Community Archives
What are Community Archives and why do they exist? This guiding question will help us understand the intersections between community, state, memory, and history.
Exploring Community Archives
How are Community Archives different?
Work in teams to compare one of the above archives with the Utah State Archives. Take 15 minutes to complete your comparison (then we'll talk about the archives).
- Who collects materials in community archives (vs. traditional archives)?
- Who decides how the materials are described?
- What services do the archives provide their communities?
- Why do community archives exist?
Creating Your Own Archive
Every community can create its own archive, it just takes a group of folks getting together and wanting to tell their story.
- Start by asking yourselves: how do I want to remember this community?
- notes, diaries, reflections, pictures, recordings
- Next: gather reflections and documents.
- Finally: organize those documents and describe them so that others may someday see them.
- Organization involves both: 1) figuring out how to display materials and 2) figuring out how to describe them
Getting started with Archival Description
Archival description involves the intentional development of metadata, data about data, and then associating that metadata to an object.
- SAADA has a lovely example
- Common archival description elements:
- Subject Heading(s) to describe the item
- Title of the item
- Date the item was created
- Subject(s) depicted in the item
- Type of item
- Location where the item was created
- Description of the item
- Provenance
- Name of the originator collection
- Donor
- Item history (what the archivist did to the item since it joined the archive)
Practice your archival descriptions
Work in teams to describe your items in 15 minutes.
- Pamphlet team
- Broadside team
Comparisons (don't look at these until we work through them as a class)
- Pamphlet team
- Broadside team
