What is #archivesglow?

Published Jan. 13, 2020
Updated Oct. 18, 2021

Nancy Godoy and Alana Varner
Nancy Godoy and Alana Varner
As you may have seen in our previous posts, we often tag our blog posts with the hashtag #archivesglow. We would like to explain the meaning behind this hashtag and provide moments from the Community-Driven Archives (CDA) team of what they interpret #archivesglow to mean. For many of us on the CDA team, we take #archivesglow very seriously and consider this hashtag a form of self-care. For me, #archivesglow means many things. It means healing. It means empathy. It means being seen as a biracial woman of color. 

I remember the first time I experienced the #archivesglow feeling after participating in a community-driven archiving workshop. It was the first time I volunteered at an Archives and Preservation workshop in 2017. During this event, I met so many people who had photographs and stories associated with their photos that they wanted to share with me. They talked in detail about what was happening in the photograph or told me a story about the person in the photograph. After the 4-hour event volunteers and others who helped out during the event started the breakdown of the equipment and getting the supplies together to pack up the van to travel back to Arizona State University (ASU). The feelings I was experiencing at that time felt surreal and something I have never experienced before. I felt like I was floating, like I had a huge adrenaline rush happening and I couldn’t place why I had this feeling but I did. Once I had time away from the event and spoke to others over the next few days and weeks, and having spoken to many people who have since done volunteering for events that the CDA team puts on, I understood this feeling now to be #archivesglow.

This series will be another collaborative effort between the entire team here at CDA as we talk about what #archivesglow means to each of us and how radical empathy can manifest itself within the work we do here at the ASU Library. We hope you enjoy this series as #archivesglow is an important topic within community-driven archiving work performed here at CDA and because this means so much to each of us on the team.  Alana Varner and Nancy Godoy

Contact me, Jessica Salow, with feedback at Jessica.Salow@asu.edu, as I would love to hear from you your thoughts regarding the work we here at ASU are doing in community archiving around Arizona. We would also love to hear your stories of how you express #archivesglow with others in your life. Also please provide feedback on what you would like to see from us in future blog posts. See you next week!