New grant project focuses on community-engaged digital preservation

Published March 6, 2020
Updated Oct. 18, 2021

For her work teaching Arizona communities how to preserve their digital-born archival materials, Nancy Godoy,  Associate Archivist of ASU Library's Chicano/a Research Collection, has been awarded $80,111 in grant support by the Library Services and Technology Act program of the Arizona State Library, Archives & Public Records, a division of the Secretary of State, with federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The grant, “Community-Driven Archives: Digital Preservation Workshop,” will focus only on digital preservation, an area of need discovered while hosting educational archival workshops in the community as part of a grant award she received in 2017 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“A lot of communities over the last 10 to 20 years have been producing all of this digital content and don’t know what to do with it,” said Godoy. “Civil rights organizations, especially, have all their history in digital formats. How can we help these communities preserve them?”

Godoy is the leader of ASU Library’s newly launched Community-Driven Archives Initiative and was recently named a 2020 Mover and Shaker by the Library Journal for her pioneering work redefining the role of archives as a powerful advocacy tool for communities that have been historically marginalized, misrepresented or erased.