In 2017, the Arizona State University Library was awarded a $450,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the project titled “Engaged, Educating, and Empowering: Developing Community-Driven Archival Collections.” This three-year project was designed to build and expand community-driven collections in an effort to preserve and improve the archival collections of marginalized communities within Arizona. Why this grant is an important step in correcting the historical record of the archival collections within Arizona is due to the findings conducted in 2010 that found 0-2 percent of archival collections within Arizona repositories represent Black, Latino, Asian and the LGBTQ communities here in Arizona despite a population of upwards of 42 percent.
The goals and objectives of the grant include building community-engaged partnerships, co-developing community-driven collections, providing online access to collections and creating a toolkit for other institutions and archivists that can be used to develop community-driven archives projects. The ways we are measuring success for the grant are by the relationships within communities we build through the grant, the people who attend our workshops associated with the grant, the community-driven archival collections we hope will be donated to ASU through the grant, and the amount of unique visits to the ASU Digital Repository. Additionally, through the grant, we hold two distinctive workshops to educate communities regarding the foundational work of archivists. The first of these workshops is the Archives & Preservation Workshop, in which we teach participants the praxis of archival work by describing the process taken up by archivists for appraising, arranging and describing items within archival collections. The second workshop titled Scanning and Oral History Days Workshop, is a 4-hour event where people learn how to scan their archival material or conduct an oral history interview with a Story Center Listening Station.
In addition, and most importantly, the purpose of the grant is to create community archivists who want to start up or continue the work necessary in order to address the long standing issue addressed above regarding representation in Arizona archives. With data collected from these events through participant surveys during and after the workshops over the first year of the grant (2017-2018) it has revealed the success of the project. According to survey data, 97.6 percent of participants feel the ASU Library created an experience that engaged them in community archiving, 97.3 percent of participants believe that seeing their communities represented in Arizona archives is important, and 96.7 percent of participants feel prepared to be a community archivist after attending an event. An example of the success of these workshops is Irma Payan a community archivist and retired teacher who, after attending multiple workshops, has continued the work of community archiving in her community.
Community feedback is important to us and if you would like to become involved in community archiving and the work ASU Library is committed to providing to these marginalized communities, please consider joining our Community Advisory Committee. If you are a student at ASU, consider joining the Student Advisory Committee. This is a great way to create long-term change in Arizona’s archives and assist these communities with the continued struggle of feeling dehumanized and forgotten.
“Reimage the archive not as a static repository but as an active site of knowledge production that could realize the emancipatory potential of its central subject” -Dr. Maria Cotera
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 also want your feedback on what you would like to see from us in future blog posts. In next week’s post we will start one of our visual themed sections of the blog which I am very excited to share with you all. See you next week!