From Field Building to Technical Infrastructure: Growing Support for Community-Based Archives
In 2018, Shift Collective hosted Architecting Sustainable Futures (ASF) bringing together community-based archives, archivists and funding partners together to discuss the future of community-based archives. Collectively we asked, how do we design sustainable funding models to ensure that these organizations can continue stewarding and sharing some of the most valuable cultural heritage materials documenting marginalized communities and their histories? During our time together we uncovered various barriers to sustainable funding models and discussed solutions for overcoming them through collaboration amongst community-based archives and with funding partners.
This past November we gathered once again for ASF5 (Architecting Sustainable Futures at 5) to highlight and celebrate the achievements of community-based archives over the past 5 years, evaluate how we addressed the recommendations outlined in 2018, and to develop an advocacy and action agenda to continue to grow and support the field of community-based archives over the next 5 years. While sustainable funding continues to be a need for community-based archives, participants also expressed their needs for sustainable collaboration models and operational, autonomous infrastructure supported by but not owned by external funders and institutions. Our full report from this meeting is forthcoming.
And that takes us from Architecting Sustainable Futures to our newest collaborative project, Modeling Sustainable Futures. This 3-year project, which is generously funded by the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, brings together community-based archives to explore decentralized digital storage solutions to ensure the continued preservation of valuable materials that mostly exist independently of other traditional academic or government-run cultural heritage institutions.
This is an ethical framework to guide how we can care for ourselves and memories, and archives and what are the needs for that. We’re centering ourselves first.
— Research Faculty Member
In year one, our research faculty representing community-based archives discussed and identified the ethical, cultural, and technical needs of these small cultural memory organizations and explored how a decentralized storage network might meet the need for autonomous infrastructures including digital storage solutions. As the decentralized web may be a new concept for many archives and community-based archives and we recognized the potential positive and negative implications technologies, we named the potential implications and proposed a harm reduction model that both acknowledges the challenges of digital storage for community-based archives and names the potential harms and how we might minimize the possibility and impact of those harms before we commit to using them.
Year two of the project focuses on designing a prototype for community-centered, non-extractive, affordable, and accessible long-term storage centering five community-based archives and their digital collections using our Historypin platform as the front-end interface. We’ll also turn our attention to project dissemination amongst other community-based archives and potential collaborators. We recently shared updates in our quarterly public call and at a lunchtime conversation in collaboration with the Flickr Foundation in London on April 22. We’ll be sharing more about our work in Paris at the IIPC Web Archiving Conference on April 26. If you’d like to learn more about Modeling Sustainable Futures, please follow our work here or reach out to our Community Engagement Strategist, Zakiya Collier for an informational call.
