By Michelle Caswell and Bergis Jules

The Trump Administration is openly waging a war against America’s public libraries, archives, and museums and the historical evidence they preserve. In August, the President instructed his staff to conduct an audit of Smithsonian Museums, calling particular attention to the ways that the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture focused too much, in his estimation, on “how bad slavery was.” In a letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie C. Bunch, the White House stressed the need for federal museums “to celebrate American exceptionalism” and “remove divisive or partisan narratives.”

The audit comes after an April Executive Order promised to “Restor[e] Truth and Sanity to American History” by purging any “divisive” museum content related to the history of racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. In a dizzying array of executive actions the Administration has gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC); fired the National Archivist and the Librarian of Congress; and ordered a purge of books addressing race and gender in the U.S. Naval Academy Library. This culture of censorship has also had a chilling effect on non-government museums, some of which have cancelled exhibitions and changed language around exhibitions featuring art that may affront the Trump administration. As these unprecedented attempts of historical erasure rage on, we must ensure that safe spaces where members of a wide range of communities can tell their stories will continue to exist.

Yet, we were not caught off guard entirely by these devastating developments. After working for the past 20 years in the cultural memory sector, we have seen how federal institutions are oftentimes not safe spaces for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities to tell their stories.

In order to protect the full range of our culture, history and shared stories, we need to increase investments in independent community-based archives. These are independent spaces in which members of marginalized communities come together to document, preserve, and share their own histories on their own terms. Ranging from small historical societies that start in a community member’s basement or garage to digital spaces of documentation and online exhibition, community archives empower marginalized communities to tell their own stories free from government interference.

For example, Shorefront Legacy Center in Evanston, Illinois is an organization that collects, preserves and educates through the lived experiences and histories of Black communities along Chicago’s suburban north shore. Archivists at the Shorefront Legacy Center were responsible for drafting a harm report detailing the history of racist redlining practices in Evanston. The report supported the work of the City of Evanston to create a $10 million reparations fund for Black residents.

For another example, the After Violence Archive, run by the After Violence Project, is an online repository for oral histories, correspondence, art, and other records documenting state-sanctioned violence in the U.S. These materials help us understand the personal impact of police violence, mass incarceration, and the death penalty, and move towards futures that do not rely on more violence and retribution.

Invisible Histories is yet another example. They locate, collect, research, and create community-based, educational programming around LGBTQ history in the Deep South. They also run the Queer History South conference, which focuses on issues in Southern LGBTQ history and archiving.

Community archives like these are filled with materials that demonstrate successful strategies for resistance and provide inspiration to keep social movements going. Deeply rooted in the communities they serve and represent, these organizations are based on tenets of care, sustainability, and belonging. These archives are also committed to a critical inquiry of our historical narrative and celebration of our diverse histories. Today, they are more important– and more precarious– than ever.

This independence comes at a cost. Most community-based archives struggle for basic resources to fulfill their important missions. Many of these organizations are volunteer run and exist without adequate support for operations and basic care for the rich collections they hold. Despite the wealth of cultural knowledge they steward through their vast collections, these archives have been chronically underfunded by government agencies and private foundations for decades, passed over in favor of wealthier institutions that, in some cases, promise longer term stability and prestige, but they also propagate dominant narratives to appease majoritarian audiences. And we have already seen the ways, under the current Administration, these dominant historical narratives around “Western Civilization” and American exceptionalism will be favored to receive federal support.

This is why we need funding models and incentives that more aggressively shift the burden of care for these collections to independent cultural memory organizations like community-based archives. We have been advocating for decades that federal agencies and private foundations should take the work of community-based archives seriously. In the face of the politically motivated takeover of government agencies, private funding is more important than ever. Even as we call for the immediate reinstatement of the programs that direct taxpayer dollars to grassroots memory work, and some of that is happening, we know we must also build sustainable alternatives.

The principles of mutual aid offer one avenue forward. Financial gifts from individual community members are also important sources of funding right now. By pooling small gifts from individual community members, even communities with few financial resources can make a huge impact. In our communities, we can collaboratively support each other to do autonomous archival work in the face of historic erasure, create networks of care and mutual aid around preservation, and build solidarity to critique the systems that have underinvested in this work. The Community Archives Collaborative is a global peer support and resource sharing network that is attempting to do just that.

Yet there is no replacement for large gifts from private foundations. Philanthropic foundations have a tremendous opportunity to support the sustainability of independent community-based archives and to bolster their vital work. In this current political moment, where diverse and inclusive views of our shared cultural memory are threatened, community-based archives represent perhaps our most effective model for resisting these overt acts of historical erasure.

Foundations should come together to jointly fund this important work. For example, a national fund to support independent cultural memory organizations like community-based archives would be a great starting point. In 2018, and again in 2023, community-based archives gathered together in New Orleans to examine the funding landscape for their field and to explore new ideas towards supporting their capacity building and sustainability. The resulting report, Architecting Sustainable Futures, presented a road map of funding possibilities for foundations that is more relevant than ever and should be adopted. Foundations that dedicate programs to civic engagement, social entrepreneurship, economic development, technology and society, education, and democracy should all embrace community archives’ impact in these areas. Foundations should also increase direct giving to these archives and launch outreach and engagement efforts targeted to this sector to build relationships and explore possibilities together.

Foundations have already demonstrated strong leadership this year to defend freedom of speech and firmly stand behind the work that they do. As historical erasure continues to be one of the gravest threats against our democracy, foundations can increase support for these independent cultural memory organizations stewarding the histories of our most vulnerable and marginalized communities, so they can continue to inspire and tell our stories free from government interference.

The government will not accurately preserve all of our nation’s stories. Only we can, collectively. Let’s make sure we support the sustainability of the organizations that can guide us through this crisis and into a more equitable future.

….

Michelle Caswell, is a Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work. She is on the board of the Shorefront Legacy Center and was co-founder of the South Asian American Digital Archive. She co-directs the UCLA Community Archives Lab.

Bergis Jules is an Archivist and Public Historian with the Shift Collective. He is the convener of Architecting Sustainable Futures, an initiative focused on designing sustainable funding models with community-based archives, and increasing resource streams that support these organizations.

If Federal Museums Aren’t Allowed to Tell the Truth About the Past, it’sTime to Start Supporting… was originally published in Sustainable Futures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This report describes a three-day event hosted in New Orleans by Shift Collective in November 2023, called Architecting Sustainable Futures at Five Years (ASF@5): A Celebration, Assessment, and Agenda Setting Convening for Community-Based Archives. The report describes our time together and outlines some of the recommendations developed by the participants. ASF@5 was held five years after we hosted the first Architecting Sustainable Futures meeting in 2018 and both meetings were made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation.

Because Shift Collective is committed to ensuring the record of our shared cultural memory becomes more inclusive, the organizations selected for participation in ASF@5 included community-based archives that primarily serve or document marginalized people and communities, including LGBTQIA people, Indigenous people, African Americans, Latinx people, immigrants, and victims of police violence and mass incarceration. The audience for ASF@5 also included people who work in cultural memory funding organizations, academic libraries, museums, and public libraries.

We hope you enjoy reading through the report and find the information useful whether you are a someone working in community-based archives, a funder, memory worker, or community member. Please reach out to us if you have any questions.

Report: Getting Beyond Surviving to Thriving was originally published in Sustainable Futures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On Friday, June 19th, Documenting the Now hosted a live streamed conversation with WITNESS, The Blackivists, Texas After Violence Project, and Project STAND. We are so thankful to the 800+ attendees and to our amazing panelists: Tracy Drake, Raquel Flores-Clemons, Erin Glasco, Stacie Williams, Skyla Hearn, Steven Booth, Gabriel Solis, Yvonne Ng, Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, and Jessica Ballard. Also much thanks to the Documenting the Now team members who helped put the event together: Alexandra Dolan-Mescal (who also designed the social media graphic), Francis Kayiwa, and Ed Summers.

Below is a recording of the conversation or you can hop on over to YouTube.

This is the original event description:

The recent wave of protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, have been inspiring and have renewed calls to dismantle the racist systems that inflict so much harm on Black people and other marginalized people. While the protests seemed to have ignited a shift in public opinion towards finally doing what is right, the violent reaction from law enforcement to the protesters has been disturbing and yet an unsurprising aspect of the recent events. As archivists, activists, and other memory workers attempt to document these protests, it is vital to consider how protestors can be protected from further harm by police while they are taking part in actions or when information about them is found in archives at a later date. In this conversation, Documenting the Now, WITNESS, Texas After Violence Project, Blackivists, and Project STAND will discuss actions that protestors and memory workers can take and resources they can use to safely and ethically document the extreme police violence we are seeing towards protestors.

These are some of the resources that were share by our panelists during the conversation:

Documenting the Now

• DocNow Digital Blackness Symposium: Panel- The Ferguson Effect on Local Activism and Community Memory
• Documenting the Now White Paper on Ethics and Social Media Archiving
• Archivists Supporting Activists
• Join DocNow Slack
• Documenting Activism Now

The Blackivists

• Five Tips for Organizers, Protestors, and Anyone Documenting Movements
• The Blackivists on Documenting Movements

Texas After Violence Project

• Documenting Narratives of Violence: Mitigating Risks
• Documenting Narratives of Violence: Trauma-Informed Interviewing

WITNESS

• Filming Police Violence in the United States resources
• People’s Database for Community-Based Police Accountability: A Berkeley Copwatch / WITNESS Initiative
• Profiling the Police (El Grito de Sunset Park & WITNESS)
• How To Film Police (US)
• I Shot A Video Of Police Brutality During A Protest. Should I Post It Online?
• Eyes on ICE: Documenting Abuses Against Immigrant Communities resources
• Real Or Rumor: How To Verify Online Reports Of ICE Raids
• Legal Video Advocacy resources
• Plano De Coleta — Operações Policiais E Militares Em Favelas Ou Áreas Periféricas (Portuguese)
• Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video
• Video as Evidence Field Guide

Project STAND

• Archiving Student Activism Toolkit
• S.A.V.E Method
• College and University Responses/Reaction
• Presentation-Prezi Link

Archiving Protests, Protecting Activists was originally published in Documenting DocNow on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Update 4/20/2020: NEH has released its application for emergency funding. Applications due May 11th.

Update 4/21/2020: NEH has also sent $30 Million to the 56 state humanities councils. The state councils have started offering emergency funding. Please visit the websites of the state humanities councils to find out about applying for funds. There are several application deadlines to consider.

Update 4/21/2020: NEA has opened its application process to offer emergency funding to arts organizations impacted by Covid19. See application instructions on their website.

Update 4/21/2020: IMLS has made $30 Million in emergency funding available to states through the States Libraries Administrative Agencies (SLAA). See how much of the money your state received and contact your SLAA to apply.

Update 5/5/2020: Mellon Foundation issues call for 2020 Community-Based Archives grant proposals. Application due July 1st.

Update 5/10/2020: IMLS announced a new emergency funding opportunity: Cares Act Grants for Museums and Libraries. Applications due June 12th.

The spread of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) and our collective actions to mitigate its impact on our personal safety, public health, and the economy, has changed our lives in permanent ways that won’t be fully realized for a long time. As we’ve watched the closure of businesses and the loss of jobs mounting over the past month, I can’t help but worry about how cultural memory organizations like community-based archives, already facing tremendous resource constraints, will make it through the end of 2020. The layoffs and closures are already happening in the community memory sector and will continue in the coming months, and community-based archives will suffer losses as well. As funding and other resources are being put forward to support community memory organizations, like museums, archives, libraries, and arts organizations, equitable access and distribution of those those resources should be foundational. Smaller organizations with less resources such as community-based archives, and especially those that serve already marginalized and oppressed communities, will be at a disadvantage when it comes to accessing these resources. We should ensure that the mechanisms put in place to qualify and apply for these emergency funds are equitable and they consider the capacity of cultural memory organizations that will be seeking support.

Like many of you, I have been overwhelmed by the impact of the pandemic and how to cope with the personal and professional disruptions. In my attempts at adjusting to the situation, I’m generally feeling helpless. Beyond caring for my family and doing our part to be socially responsible by staying at home and not putting the public at further risk, it has been difficult to focus on meaningful ways to contribute outside of our own situation. By the way we already loved our kids teachers, but now we have an even deeper appreciation for them because OUR KIDS ARE AT HOME 24 HOURS A DAY, 7 DAYS A WEEK. So their teachers, Mrs. Reed and Ms. Cruz, deserve all the praise, and pay, and benefits when this thing is over.

Anyway, I think maybe one thing we can do at this time is to try and find ways to continue doing some of the small things that bring us a little bit of peace and joy and to share some of those things with our networks when we are able. So our family has been spending more time in the garden enjoying the flowers and taking pictures of the insects, birds, and butterflies that come hang out. It’s been fun exploring for bugs with the kids and generally being more attentive to the simple beauty that surrounds us every day that we may not always have time to appreciate.

I’m also thinking this is a good time to do a little advocacy on behalf of community-based archives, as these organizations will be facing tough times in the next few months and years because of the virus’ impact on social life and the economy. Many of them are already struggling financially and the current crisis could be a death blow to some. But at the same time community-based archives and small community museums have survived lean times in the past while contributing immeasurable value to the communities where they exist. So while they will undoubtedly struggle along with the rest of the community memory sector, they could also serve as valuable models for how to operate and continue to serve your community in times of crisis.

I was excited to see that NEH, NEA, and IMLS were each allocated funding in the latest rescue bill passed by Congress. The levels of funding are obviously not enough to address the economic hit cultural memory organizations will take but it will certainly help. The American Alliance of Museum estimates that museums are losing up to $33 Million per day and 30% of museums may close because of the crisis. As the crisis continues, the MET estimates they could lose $100 Million in 2020 through revenue losses and layoffs. According to the National Humanities Alliance, “the legislation also extends forgivable Small Business Administration loans to nonprofit organizations-including museums, historic sites, independent libraries, and scholarly societies-with fewer than 500 employees to cover operational expenses.” My hope is that the funds will be equitably shared with a diverse group of cultural memory organizations, including community-based archives that have been struggling to access funding in the past. Even though we have seen funders take some steps to support community-based archives recently, for example, IMLS grant programs and funded projects and the Mellon Foundation grants for community-based archives, we need to continue our efforts to support these invaluable cultural memory organizations. Community-based archives like the Southern California Library, South Asian American Digital Archive, South Side Community Arts Center, the Shorefront Legacy Center, and the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, and many more need our support now more than ever.

As we highlighted in our Architecting Sustainable Futures report, typically funding organizations overlook community-based archives as legitimate sites where historical preservation and community education takes place, and the barriers to accessing grants are so high that the larger, more well resourced organizations like academic libraries, have much higher chances of securing funding. Because of Covid-19, some non-profit funders are now removing these barriers and making money available faster to grantees, which is a welcome development. These kinds of responses from humanities and library/archives funders would be welcomed as well to mitigate potential harm to already struggling community-based archives. If these archives are not supported through the crisis and some are forced to close their doors, academic libraries and other well resourced organizations that are already better positioned to weather the crisis, may also gain from their misfortune when the post-Coronavirus collection acquisitions begin to happen. This is a very real possibility that should not sit well with us.

“We must refuse the rules of inclusion, and vocabularies of recognition and legitimacy that are meant to contain our histories. We should not echo articulations that we do not already exist in the archive. We are not marginal or other to the archive, but integral to it. We may be silenced or made invisible, but we have always been present.” Yusef Omowale, Director — Southern California Library

Yusef Omowale reminds us that people who have been socially, politically, and economically excluded from the collective benefits that dominant society enjoy, have always found ways to exist and preserve their culture despite significant challenges. In that view, maybe many of these spaces will still be here after Covid-19 is under control because they have always done more with less and relied on the community as partners. From a more optimistic perspective, perhaps community-based archives are the model for sustainability, innovation, and creativity that we need in our current moment of crisis as they can provide experienced guidance other cultural memory organizations can use to navigate through the lean times ahead. Perhaps they can offer the wisdom and practicality that cultural memory organizations will need to rely on for the next several months and years.

I certainly believe community-based archives will have a lot to offer but they will need help as well. While the legitimacy and necessity of community-based archives have never been in question, at least not in the communities that gave them life and that continue sustain them, the coming storm of disruptions to their operations post Covid-19 will be significant. Especially as the people in those same sustaining communities, already suffering from the effects of inequality, are being disproportionately infected with the virus and will be the most likely to be overlooked in the economic relief effort. As grant funders gear up to support the cultural memory sector, my hope is that some of this emergency funding will also be shared with community-based archives and other resource strapped spaces that specifically focus on preserving the histories of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, GLBTQ, and other marginalized and oppressed people.

Beside funders doing their part to make sure emergency funding is equitably shared with a diverse set of cultural memory organizations, this is also an opportunity for community-based archives to come together to support each other through mutual aid, collectives, and other resource sharing models. While there are long term plans for community-based archives to explore shared resource models such as the Community Archives Collaborative, the immediacy of the moment calls for supporting each other now. Community-based archives can share money with each other to keep the lights on, co-develop online exhibits, programming and collections based curriculum that could be used in online teaching, share staff expertise to apply for grants, share technology such as video conferencing subscriptions, or simply create opportunities to virtually network and counsel each other. Finding creative ways to support each other through this crisis would create a solid foundation that can help community-based archives emerge on the other side of this thing in a stronger position.

While community-based archives that operate as official non-profits are able to apply for relief to cover salaries, rent, and other operating expenses through the new legislation, the reality of these spaces accessing any funds without help or favorable application mechanisms is probably low. First, many of them either don’t have or have lost their non-profit status because of capacity issues, and second, these archives were already unable to access funding in more stable times because they simply did not have the resources, capacity, or access to the networks of people who are knowledgeable about these funding opportunities and how to complete the applications. So presumably many of them will be left out this funding opportunity as well. If the new emergency funding now available through NEH, NEA, IMLS and others like the Getty Trust don’t make their way to community-based archives, we have to consider what might happen to their collections if they have to permanently close? Will this mean the loss of access to valuable archival collections, the end of impactful programming, and the shuttering of safe spaces for the communities where these archives are based and that will be most impacted by the virus? These are possibilities community-based archives and their advocates have to prepare for, but my hope is they won’t materialize.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to do what I can to support by offering some modest compensation to community-based archives that want to share their stories on the Sustainable Futures blog. While I know it’s difficult for many to focus on work right now, it is also a good time for community-based archives to advocate for themselves and share how they are planning for a post Covid-19 world and also share some of the strategies they have employed in the past to weather crises while maintaining their collections, organizations, and community. Check out the blog and reach out to me on Twitter (@BergisJules) or by email at bergis.jules@gmail.com if you are interested in contributing.

Supporting Community-Based Archives Through the Covid-19 Crisis was originally published in Sustainable Futures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In December 2017, the Documenting the Now project hosted Digital Blackness in the Archive at the Ferguson Public Library in Ferguson, MO. At the symposium, local activists challenged us to consider archiving the traces of social justice protests and organizing beyond social media and the web, which is the main focus of the Documenting the Now project, and to meet activists in the communities where they lived and did their work. Speaking on the panel, The Ferguson Effect on Local Activism and Community Memory, Alexis Templeton, a prominent activist and community leader, who was a key figure leading the 2014 Ferguson protests sparked by the murder of Michael Brown, put it plainly during her presentation, stating “I’m not a bunch or retweets and favorites. I’m a fucking human. And that’s what social media misses.” In this new phase of work on the Documenting the Now project, we embraced this challenge to be more comprehensive in our approach to advocating for the documentation of contemporary social movements.

The Digital Blackness symposium helped us to further realize that while social media, the web, and other digital tools play a vital role in our modern day social movements and activist’s organizing strategies, when it comes to archiving that activity, the human being doing the work is still the most important part of the story. In addition to the new work will be doing around software development and pedagogy in this new phase of the Documenting the Now project, we will be furthering our advocacy efforts to document contemporary activism by working directly with activists through a set of community-based workshops designed around archiving activism.

Through a combination of invitations and an application process (now closed), we are working with social justice organizations throughout the United States that would like to benefit from a free community-based archives workshop in their community. To date the workshops have focused on helping activists to develop some skills and to use available tools to collect, preserve, and share their web, social media and other types of digital content that could later be placed in their own archive. Our hope is that through creating their own archives, activists can better document their activities, assert a greater level of control over their own narratives, and secure access to digital and physical content that has been safely captured and preserved through methods that can allow that content to be available at a later date for use in organizing, as evidence, for research, and for other purposes. Additionally, the workshops are a great opportunity for us to learn from activists in the field, who are using social media platforms and the web to archive their work, and the pains and pressure points involved in that activity. This opportunity to learn from activists is vital because hearing directly them helps us refine our approach to the tools and practices we are developing or advocating for on the Documenting the Now project.

During the day long workshops, participants gain some knowledge about archiving digital images and documents, digital security, and surveillance issues around web and social media content, and some skills to safely archive content generated on mobile devices. The workshops also present an opportunity to build relationships with local archivists and other historical documenters in their city, as some professionals are invited to participate, and an opportunity to engage in conversations leading to deeper understanding about how digital content generated online can affect our personal, social, and professional lives.

In addition to learning some of the practical and technical aspects of archiving, we wanted to make sure our approach was well rounded and addressed teaching archives from a critical perspective, so we open each workshop by challenging the idea of the archive and addressing the long legacy of the archive as a tool of white supremacy. This morning portion of the workshop, Building with Communities, is lead by Jarrett Drake, Micha Broadnax, and Jes Neal. And as an example of some of the activities, Jarrett teaches his session through a framework of liberatory memory work. The main objectives of his session are “to learn how archives, concretely and abstractly, often work in opposition to liberation and, to identify aspects of liberatory memory work that can be applied in specific struggles for liberation.”

The afternoon portion of our workshops, Learning with Communities, is devoted to the ethical, practical and technical aspects of archiving, and the whole team contributes including Alexandra Dolan-Mescal and Ed Summers. Meredith Clark, co-PI and Academic Lead for Documenting the Now, also attends the workshops as part of our own research on the project, and to help us assess the impact of the content we are sharing. While it is difficult to convey the full experience of the workshops, which have all been transformative in one way or another, hopefully this gives a sense of the richness of the day.

2019 Workshops

We held four workshops in 2019 and we’re averaging around fifteen attendees per workshop. The workshops were hosted by the Southern California Library in Los Angeles, CA, Don’t Shoot Portland Portland, OR, the Texas After Violence Project in Austin, TX, Petty Propolis, in Detroit, MI. The attendees represented several different organizations in their local/regional area. For example, the workshop hosted in Austin, TX had representatives from twelve activist organizations including Grassroots Leadership, Youth Rise Texas, The Center for Popular Democracy, and Latino Justice. The Southern California Library workshop had ten local organizations represented including A New Way of Life, Black Women for Wellness, LA Tenants Union, and California Latinas for Reproductive Justice. We felt this model of inviting representatives from several different organizations would be more effective as far as the information reaching a larger number of activists in a locality. We chose this model over one where we worked only with members of a single organization. Our hope is that activists will learn a few things with us and take information back to their colleagues.

What have we learned so far?

1. It is difficult to attempt to build a digital archive during the one-day workshop, especially when it is the first time meeting a group of people and when we don’t yet fully understand their needs. One of our original goals with the workshops was to try and get each organization started with a basic version of a digital archive to support preservation and access to their content. Our hope was to utilize Mukurtu CMS to accomplish this, mostly because it has features that give content creators a high level of control. After the first workshop in Los Angels we quickly understood that the attendees were really more interested in learning more about the archiving process, how they can use archives in their work, and engaging in critical discussions about the value and history of archives, versus attempting to build a digital archive during our first meeting. We pivoted from this aspect of our original model after the second workshop in Portland and decided to focus on what the activists actually wanted based on their early feedback. We have now decided that the best model to develop the archive will be to create a separate activity at a later date, after these initial workshop and in partnership with our host organizations, to work with the activist organizations that want to take on the task of starting to build their own digital archive with Mukurtu CMS. For example, this could be a “community archiving day or week”. Our hope is that we will have learned much more about the archiving needs of the organizations by that point and this community archiving activity will be more intentional and specifically focused on building out that first digital archive.
2. Important aspects of contemporary organizing, e.g. message amplification, coalition building, and targeted advocacy and awareness are carried out online through social media platforms, websites, messaging apps, and email, etc. But activists still do the most significant parts of their work outside of these spaces, and on the ground in the communities where they live, therefore archive building for activist organizations should be informed by a well rounded approach that includes in-person community engagement, oral history collection, social media/web content collection, and collection of other physical materials, including activists input in content description and the selection technology for hosting collections, etc.
3. Activists have a deep interest in archiving their work and want to learn the skills and access the resources that will help them do so. Indeed, activists are already creating their own archives. Some examples from our workshop partners include groups like the Media Mobilizing project and Don’t Shoot Portland, among others.
4. Activists are overwhelmingly interested in using their own archives to inform their ongoing organizing, awareness, and advocacy work and want to learn the best strategies for activating their archives.
5. Funding, primarily to support staffing, space, and technology, are key barriers to activist organizations creating and sustaining their own archives.
6. There are several existing community-based archive (CBA) models that could be instructive for activist organizations interested in building and sustaining their own archives. As community-based archives continue to evolve, we are seeing that they can serve as excellent models for activist organizations that want to create and maintain their own archives. Two key areas where CBA model may be instructive include activating collections and assessing and demonstrating the impact of collections. It may be a worthwhile effort to get community-based archives and activist organizations to be in conversation with each other.

2020 Workshops

We will be holding six workshops in 2020, hosted by BlackLivesMatter DC, Survived and Punished NYC, Network Delaware, Media Mobilizing Project, SISTAfire, and the Warrior Women Project. We have not selected the dates for the 2020 workshops but we are excited to work with with each of these groups and we’re very much looking forward to learning from them as well.

As always, please get in touch with us if you have any questions about our work. You can email us at info@docnow.io or connect with us on Twitter and Slack. You can also connect with me on Twitter.

Documenting Activism Now was originally published in Documenting DocNow on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On September 21st and 22nd, 2018, Shift Design, Inc, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, hosted Architecting Sustainable Futures: Exploring Funding Models in Community-Based Archives in New Orleans. The symposium was an opportunity to help equip community-based archives with tools to address one of their most pressing needs for self-sufficiency: sustainable funding. The organizations selected to participate in the symposium included community-based archives that primarily serve or document the lives of marginalized people and communities, including LGBTQIA people, indigenous people, African Americans, Latinx people, and victims of police violence and incarceration. Attendees at the symposium included activists, practitioners from community-based archives, cultural heritage and humanities grant funders, academic library, museum, and public library professionals, and scholars.

The symposium had five main objectives. They revolved around information gathering and analysis, knowledge sharing, and developing recommendations, all aimed at addressing the long-term sustainability of community-based archives.

1. To understand the broad field of community-based
   archives, their diversity of scope, intent, and capacity.
2. To understand current funding models of community-
   based archives.
3. To understand the funding landscape for community-based
   archives.
4. To identify gaps and opportunities to support and build
   capacity in community-based archives.
5. To make recommendations for different ways
   community-based archives can receive funding given
   their capacity.

You can read the full symposium report which includes details about our findings and recommendations, and you can also see some of those findings listed below. We look forward to building on the work of Architecting Sustainable Futures in the coming months and years, and we hope the report and our work will help to generate more financial, community, and intellectual investment in community-based archives.

Key Findings

1. Community-based archives practitioners would
   benefit from a peer network offering resources
   that could support activities related to knowledge
   and practice sharing, capacity building and
   sustainability.
2. Community-based archives want to remain
   independent despite significant funding and
   resource hurdles.
3. Small donations and one-time funding are available
   to community-based archives, but substantial and
   long-term sustainable funding remains elusive.
4. Community-based archives can develop successful
   fundraising programs, but some need support to
   sustain and grow the capacity of those efforts.
5. Labor required to apply for and to manage grants
   acts as a barrier to access those funds.
6. Collaborative work with academic partners exists
   and is desired by community-based archives, but
   equity and recognition of the legitimacy of the
   archive should be foundational to the relationship.
7. Community-based archives do not want to
   compromise their values for funding or partnerships.
8. A national survey of community-based archives would help
   to better identify their needs and articulate their
   collective impact.

Many thanks to the several members of the Shift team who contributed significant amounts of time and expertise to the planning and implementation of the Architecting Sustainable Futures symposium and the writing of this final report. Bergis Jules — Director of Equity Initiatives at Shift U.S., Jon Voss — Director of Shift U.S., Tayo Medupin — Innovation Director at Shift U.K., Hali Dardar — Partnerships Manager at Shift U.S., Lynette Johnson — Innovation Lead at Shift U.S., and Jon Kardon, event planner. We also want to thank the inspiring attendees at the symposium who contributed their time and intellectual labor. We are extremely grateful to them. Architecting Sustainable Futures could not have been successful without them. We are also thankful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their continued support of work that advances the field of community-based archives. And a big thank you of course to the Architecting Sustainable Futures project advisory board and to our essay writers who contributed extra time and labor to help review and develop content for the symposium.

The symposium was an amazing opportunity to learn more about the resilience, innovation, and creativity that have sustained community-based archives over the years and that keeps them moving forward. It has also had significant impact on the field, which you can read more about in the report, and it has motivated all who attended to continue to push the field to make more space for community-based archives.

Report-Architecting Sustainable Futures: Exploring Funding Models in Community-Based Archives was originally published in Sustainable Futures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Interview One: RisePDX

A little over a month ago we wrote a short piece remembering the work of political activist Bassem Masri who had recently died at age 32. Bassem was a Palestinian-American who grew up in North St. Louis. Following the murder of Michael Brown he became known to a worldwide audience for his live stream coverage that challenged mainstream narratives about the protests that were happening in Ferguson.

In order to remember Bassem we need to remember his work. This work also forms a significant part of the records we have of the Ferguson Uprising. These live streams are particularly unique because of the way they document the protests in Ferguson and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement from the perspective of the Ferguson community itself. Unfortunately, much of Bassem’s live streaming activity has fallen victim to the maneuvers of platform capitalism, as the services he used (UStream and Bambuser) pivoted their business models, or were acquired, and content was purged.

Fortunately our story put us in touch with several activists who knew Bassem, some of whom had copies of his live streams, and were willing to talk to us about partnering to explore how to responsibly archive these and other live streams. In the next few posts we’re going to be publishing a series of interviews that we have been fortunate to have with some of these documentary activists.

One of the first activists to reach out to us was from Portland, Oregon who goes by the pseudonym RisePDX, or Rise for short. Rise chooses to remain anonymous for several reasons and we respect his wishes. As you will see in this interview, Rise helped build a distributed network of live stream practitioners that was born out of the Occupy Movement. The live streams were produced not only as a way to remember the protests, but also to serve as evidence that protected the enclaves of activists as they clashed with police. This same network helped bootstrap live stream activities in Ferguson after Michael Brown was killed, which is where Rise became familiar with Bassem’s live streaming.

As you will see Rise is an archivist at heart, and has kept copies of his and many other’s livestreams that he has downloaded from the various platforms and stored on various types of physical media. Read on below the fold to hear more about how Rise became got involved in live streaming, documentary activism, and how he sees this work evolving going forward.

How did you come to start using live streaming as a way to document protests and activism?

I learned of Livestream when I went to the pre Occupy Portland organizing meeting the day before we occupied. I was deciding how I could contribute and saw this guy carrying around a small laptop and talking to it. This was October 2011. He had a camera mounted to a PVC assembly he built. I knew this is what I could help with so I volunteered. The choice led me to learning about the technology quickly by leading the Occupy Portland livestream team for the duration. I was able to do this for a few weeks and go into the camp incognito until I revealed myself to them. That is when the infiltration drama really started heating up. I have been involved in live streaming in some fashion all over the world ever since!

What prompted you and other live streamers to go to Ferguson, MO in August 2014?

I didn’t go to Ferguson myself but Vlad and other globalrevlive collective folks did. He recruited people to stream and taught them tactics of doing so. I provided live streamer support which is something I helped create along with Dee Shanger from Toronto during the occupy movement. Streamer support consisted of helping get the stream links out through various social media platforms. We would also connect with live streamers and help them in various ways while they were live. Some of the ways we would help is moderate the chat, giving streamers tips tactics and info, advise them of stream quality or if it was down and most importantly encourage them and try to inspire them through positive reinforcement for asking great questions etc.

How effective were the Ferguson live streams?

Before Ferguson getting people at locations to stream was a logistical nightmare. I was so stressed after occupy for instance because we needed 24/7 coverage or at least a streamer available on the fly in case the police raided the camp. I was always trying to grow the livestream team we had but I was soon met with resistance for seeking new help due to ego conflicts and infiltration of law enforcement entities into the team who were trying to disrupt and destroy it. Ferguson went so much more viral than we could have imagined. Baltimore followed quickly after and the exposure to the world was so immense that live stream is something that happens all the time now and it’s mostly by people in the area. The Ferguson streams normalized live streaming of protests. Everybody livestreams now. But during these events we also saw the birth of the anti protestor citizen media characters such as No Thiefs Allowed which is an entirely different and long conversation. The end result of these people was what happened in Charlottesville and proud boys and Patriot prayer.

Can you talk about your relationship Bassem Masri and his role as one of the main live stream documenters during the Ferguson protests?

I provided stream support for Bassem. I also interacted quite a bit on Twitter with him. If I remember right I joined him in a Twitter exchange between him and the local channel who smeared him including the specific reporter. That was fun =) Bassem had an authentic truth to how he spoke. It was raw and real and sometimes full of profanity and very sharp comments but it all was coming from an oppressed experience and many people could relate and appreciate the things he said, such as to the police line. Bassem was respected by the community and viewed by most as a hero. The anti citizen media folks hated him the most as well.

There were a lot of people live streaming during Ferguson. Was there any coordination between streamers?

Yes lots of coordination. There was on the ground coordination of streamers allying, planning, and operating together and also between globalrevlive collective and other streamers supporting them online with streamer support etc.

What kinds of tools did you use for creating and sharing the livestreams? How did you learn?

We used everything we could. It started with little black and white 2011 edition IdeaPad on which we had to modify the drivers and use the browser streaming to the livestream platform. We then moved to cell phones using Bambuser and Ustream. For restreaming we initially used Procaster for livestream but then moved to XSplit, YouTube, Facebook, ManyCam, and so many others. I am pretty technical so I figured out how to use it all on my own and later on used Youtube for information as the library of YouTube became robust.

In what ways were live streamers thinking about preserving the content they were capturing. For example, were streamers thinking about this on the ground before they turned on their cameras?

Some were. Most were not. We as Globalrevlive Collective did tell streamers in stream support to do this. Some of the Ferguson streamers captured some of their streams like MissJupiter1957 but I think she still lost some stuff. Some of us who did pay attention have lost stuff to technology issues or limitations in the software that prevented us from archiving such as the old Livestream platform that was based on flash and the code didn’t consider thousands of live streams. This made downloading each one labor intensive. Globalrevlive and the Occupy Portland channel both had so many streams that it would take more than 5 minutes to refresh the video list which is also what happened when you clicked on one to download.

I personally felt the streams would be historically important especially because of what happened to the Occupy Portland Livestream channel. That channel was infiltrated and all the streams were deleted. That is the first time I thought about preserving the content and the importance of that. Most of the Occupy content is gone. I was busy and the videos started piling up so I didn’t have much time to think much about preservation but I knew people would be doing that eventually. I think streamers thought somebody was already doing it.

How much live streaming content do you think you’ve recorded about protests and activism and how have you gone about preserving some of that content?

I have thousands of streams and many of them are 6+ hour streams full of multiple streams within. Sometimes multiple streams per protest. We got good to where we had up to 8 streams going at once on a bigger protest like Ferguson. I have them all on various hard drives and burned onto DVDs and Blu-rays. I do actually need a huge drive to try to condense it all into one spot from all the media. As I have gone along, storage has been a huge expense and something I would fill up quickly always needing to buy more to continue to be able to archive. I have most of everything after Occupy including all of the Ferguson streams and that’s nearly every day of every action. But I lost the occupy stuff. Since the laptops were using browser access and not storing files locally they are lost. We hadn’t moved to phones yet so all the streams were on the livestream platform. The interface was so clunky, you couldn’t download after the fact. I thought that Livestream was actually pro activist. They gave us all premium accounts. We just thought they would always be there and the older interface meant that it was really hard to find and view everything and was completely destroyed when they were deleted. Some of the stuff lingers in some re-streams and uploads to YouTube and Tinychat or other platforms.

What are some of the issues live streamers face with the streaming services in terms of preservation, and what do you think the streaming services can do better to help streamers preserve their content?

They made it tough. You had to have premium pay accounts to livestream. Bambuser and Ustream all offered citizen media activist free accounts but not everyone knew about this option and the process to get the account was difficult. We tried to teach streamers the importance of live stream archives when we offered streaming support. Dee Shanger of Toronto ran a weekly stream on how to live stream which occurred for several years. All the platforms deleted everyone’s content suddenly and all at seemingly the same general time, and they didn’t notify anyone. We were all shocked. We are all also not shocked either as we knew it was coming but didn’t imagine that it was here along with the banning of accounts as well.

If archivists are interested in helping streamers preserve live streaming content, what are some ways they can get involved?

I do not know the answer to this question. I think the current steps of just trying to understand the community are probably really good. I think you may learn quite a bit from talking directly to streamers as you are. These questions are awesome! Trying to understand some of our tactics like mirroring events on streams could be one way archivists could begin to work on preserving the streams. Mirroring is basically streaming a stream. Ethics and consent have been difficult questions in the streaming community so I am not sure how to address those. One of the main things that helps streamers stay motivated is viewers. The more people watching, the more motivation streamers have. There has to be communication with the streamers. And the chats are a huge part of the streaming, so I collected the chats as well and archivists should make sure to include those if they are going to preserve the streams.

It’s no secret that police use social media to monitor the actions of activists during protests. How do you or others in the live streaming community think about protecting some of the activists in your footage?

The people have used live stream footage to win court cases. I have had several attorneys and others reach out to me and ask if I had certain footage, including other live streamers like Miss Jupiter. Live stream footage ironically has mostly been used against some violent and likely undercover or corporation sponsored provocateurs or patsies near them to arrest them. And MB in San Diego whose stream was used as evidence in court against him where they cited the stream but it was never shown to the jury and the supposed facts stated in court that were displayed in the stream was not what happened. In fact the cop was beligerant and aggressive and is the real perp in the situation. Mostly activists have won their cases because it proves the cops were lying.

Can you talk about some of the harassment and silencing you and other streamers faced from police, social media platforms, and live streaming services while you were doing this work?

Lots. From trying to ban me from the Livestream service and kicking me off the team without reason and trying to take over the keys to the channel . I was harassed emotionally, in person by cops and other law enforcement to try to discourage me or cause issues with our equipment. The NYPD destroyed almost $130,000 worth of Globalrev equipment. This is something Vlad sued them for and won. I think they only had to pay a fraction of the damaged equipment value back as well. Intimidation, threats of arrest, harassment, and disruption in the live stream chats, is what caused me to start archiving the chats as part of saving the streams. Something I believe only I was doing and so happy now that most of the social media platforms have embedded chat in a stream after live that plays back with stream in real time as it happened. It is cool because we have always believed that livestream is interactive media and the chat is just as important as the live stream itself.

After Bassem passed away, there was a sense that some of his streams may not have been preserved anywhere. How much of this streaming content about protests do you believe is at risk and how do you see that impacting any future archive of social justice activism?

All of it is at risk. I have quite a bit of Ferguson. I was re-streaming a lot of it in multi-streams and the chats are included too. If people’s streams disappear then so goes their protection.

What impact did participating in the protests have on your personal and professional life?

Right after occupy the corporation that I was working for fired me. I was a top performer. Since then I have had a tough time getting work here in Portland. I have been to places other than Portland since and didn’t have an issue finding work. I have had to live outside the system the past few years or I would have been homeless and I’m actually on the brink of homelessness again. I also know the truth of the corruption and have researched many things to seek truth. I have had personal relationship issues because the time I dedicated to citizen media. I also feel driven to do it even though I would rather relax. I was a huge gamer for instance and instead of playing a game in my free time, I research or tweet or find some way to help get the word out. My relationship to my kids has been impacted by not being able to spend as much time with them but I feel it is important to try and fix these problems or their world is going to be extreme and I cannot imagine that.

I didn’t get to elaborate on how successful Ferguson streaming was in the earlier question. I think it is important to note how widespread streaming has become since Ferguson. Now almost any protest usually has someone who streams or someone out there witnessing violence or police brutality and they put their camera up and stream. Also, even the mainstream media and Hollywood stream now, which I actually think is a co-opt tactic to distract from the social justice aspect of live streaming. You maybe don’t know this but Fox News now has a YouTube live stream that has been running for years when before the mainstream media pretty much viewed us as a threat and the arch enemy. They never talked about our streams and downplayed us by calling us novices.

This stream below from the Global Revolution Vimeo channel is just one example of the kinds of recordings activists made from the live streams. Several of the videos on the channel are hours in length and in some cases, because of the technology the streamers used to share their streams, there are several videos from multiple streamers showing up on one screen. The videos are a good example of the various issues that will have to be addressed in order to properly preserve these recorded streams.

#ReclaimMLK #MLK #BlackLivesMatter #J21 - from #Ferguson

Ed Summers and Bergis Jules conducted this interview and we’re thankful to RisePDX for his time.

Towards Building Community-Based Archives of Activism was originally published in Documenting DocNow on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Community-based archives hold some of the most valuable materials documenting the lives of marginalized people and they mostly exist independently of other traditional academic or government-run cultural heritage institutions. But while these archives continue to collect and preserve these histories, many of them face difficulties growing their operations, keeping their doors open, and enhancing their programming and collections activities because of a lack of funding opportunities. This is why I’m excited to help lead a new opportunity that will directly address funding for community-based archives.

With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Shift will host a symposium in New Orleans on September 13th-14th, 2018, that will focus on helping to equip community-based archives with tools to address one of their most pressing needs for self-sufficiency: sustainable funding. The target audience for participation in the symposium will include people who work in and who advocate for community-based archives, cultural heritage funders interested in supporting community-based archives, and scholars whose research helps to support community-based archives. We’re committed to ensuring the record of our shared cultural heritage becomes more inclusive and to that end, the organizations invited to participate in this symposium will be limited to community-based archives that primarily document the lives of marginalized people and communities, including people who identify as LGBTQIA, Indigenous people, African Americans, Latinx, immigrants, and victims of police violence and incarceration, among others.

While the symposium will be by invitation only, we will publish the proceedings in late 2018. Additionally, the symposium sessions will be guided by a series of essays commissioned from community-based archives practitioners and those will be shared here on this blog.

Work during the 1.5 day symposium will be centered on information gathering and analysis, knowledge sharing, and developing recommendations, all aimed at capacity building and ensuring the long-term sustainability in community-based archives. An overarching goal is to bring together a broad base of international and U.S based practitioners to better understand funding practices and to begin envisioning new models for the future. Key objectives of the symposium will be to:

1. Map the broad field of Community-Based Archives, their diversity of scope, intent and capacity
2. Examine current funding models
3. Map the available funding landscape
4. Identify gaps and opportunities where we can grow support and build capacity
5. Make recommendations for new ways Community-Based Archives can be funded

This symposium builds on important work previously carried out by advocates and practitioners in community-based archives including the Diversifying the Digital Historical Record national forums and the Cultural Heritage and Social Change Summit. These projects addressed important issues affecting community-based archives and they produced valuable knowledge we can use to better support these spaces moving forward, including the DDHR report and the CHSC report. But with this symposium we aim to take a more focused approach on funding, one of the most challenging issues facing community-based archives. Jon Voss and I have addressed some of the funding issues here and with this symposium we hope to broaden that conversation and produce some actionable solutions.

We’re excited for this first of a kind opportunity and we look forward to sharing the results with you. More information will be shared soon on the forthcoming symposium website and here on the Sustainable Futures blog, a space where we (and hopefully you) will frequently write about capacity building and sustainability in community-based archives.

Shift is a global non-profit that creates products for social change. Based in New Orleans, LA, Shift Design, Inc is a US 501(c)3 non-profit corporation that was established with a specific focus to “support libraries, archives, museums and state and local cultural heritage organizations in efforts to increase access to and discovery of photographic, sound, and video collections.” Through our work on projects like Historypin and Storybox, we are committed to an inclusive record of our shared cultural heritage.

The Andrew Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies. To this end, it supports exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work. https://mellon.org/

Architecting Sustainable Futures: Exploring Funding Models in Community-Based Archives was originally published in Sustainable Futures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let the People Lead: Supporting Sustainability vs Dependency Models for Funding Community-Based Archives

On October 20th and 21st, 2017 we wrapped up the last forum in the IMLS supported series, Diversifying the Digital Historical Record: Integrating Community Archives in National Strategies for Access to Digital Cultural Heritage. A collaborative project between the Amistad Research Center, UCR, South Asian American Digital Archive, Shorefront Legacy Center, and Mukurtu. The four forums over the past year have been great opportunities to listen to people who run community-based archives, advocates, and collaborators. But they have also been a stark reminder of the precarious clouds constantly hovering above these vital community spaces, threatening their very existence. In the grant application we defined community-based archives this way:

Some of the most valuable collections documenting the lives of marginalized people in the United States reside in spaces outside traditional academic and government institutions. They exist throughout the country as independently curated, highly valuable sites for remembering, and owned by the communities they document. Recent research in archival studies notes a growth in community-based archives. These archives are independent, grassroots alternatives to mainstream repositories through which communities make collective decisions about what is of enduring value to them, shape collective memory of their own pasts, and control the means through which stories about their past are constructed. Such organizations are often created in response to minoritized communities being shut out of dominant historical narratives created by mainstream memory institutions.

With cultural heritage funding agencies directing new focus on community-based archives, Jon Voss and I, along with a growing number of colleagues, have been thinking a lot about what the future could look like for these spaces if grant makers got serious about support. We’ve been talking about the many years we’ve spent listening to and advocating for community-based archives, in efforts to highlight and support their work, and to help the wider public recognize their existence and the legitimacy of the historical records they hold in telling our collective stories. Throughout that time, the same issues have had a consistent and almost too obvious presence when it comes to support for these spaces: money, labor, and time. They are always identified as the main barriers to progress, whether it’s for keeping the building open, hiring staff, maintaining and growing the collections, doing preservation or outreach, or providing broader access to materials. Yet there exists no comprehensive understanding of the history or current landscape of funding models for community-based archives.

If grant funders, cultural heritage advocates, government agencies, or community groups are to more effectively support community-based archives with funding models intentionally designed toward sustainability and around local values and needs, it will be vital to first understand how these spaces exist now. They’ll need to investigate the current funding practices these archives operate under, explore and learn from innovative funding models in other sectors, perform funding needs analyses that incorporate community values, and propose new models for community-based archives that are informed by these activities collectively.

Grant makers can have an extremely important role to play in funding the sustainability and the growth of community-based archives, but they risk replicating exploitative models if the people who do the the work of community archives aren’t at the table from the beginning or tapped to leadsome of these efforts.

So we would like to offer a few thoughts on how grant makers might tackle this work if the goal is truly to empower community-based archives and ensure their sustainability.

• Funding should go directly to community-based archives. This will of course require assessment of current funding and reporting requirements and the recognition of the realities of small, community-based organizations.
• Funding should not be restricted from supporting the operations or administrative needs of community-based archives. Grant makers can fully support the commitment and labor of the people who work in these spaces. That will be a key aspect helping to ensure sustainability.
• It must be recognized that academic institutions have historically presented Eurocentric, extractive, and systemically racist approaches to scholarship and research, amounting to historical trauma of the very communities these institutions now seek to engage. We must resist these ideas. Therefore, we believe that libraries, archives/special collections or museums based at academic institutions can support and collaborate on this work, but they are seldom suited to lead this work. Instead, grant funders should seek partnerships led by trusted community organizations or community-based archives.
• To design these new funding models, grant makers can continue to listen to people who work in or with community-based archives, including archivists and scholars who work with communities in collaborative and inclusive ways, local community members who can advocate for these spaces, or local social justice organizers who can help humanities funders gain deeper understanding of these communities.

And finally, cultural heritage sector grant makers should prioritize investment in community-based archives through dedicated funds and a named priority area. Models already exist in our sector where grant makers either set aside significant money targeted for specific areas of interest or where they publicly state their funding priorities for certain areas as a way to generate ideas and proposals from the community. There are many examples of this of course, but some that come to mind are the Institute for Museum and Library Services’ creation of the National Digital Platform, the Mellon Foundation’s support for the Council on Library and Information Resources Hidden Collections & Digitization projects, and the National Endowment for the Humanities’ National Digital Newspaper Program & Digital Humanities work.

Major support for community-based archives can also be structured in this way, where a significant pool of money, perhaps a “Community Archive Fund,” is set aside for direct support or re-granting. This would certainly make a strong statement that grant makers are committed to a sustainability, and not a dependency approach to supporting community-based archives.

We’d certainly like to hear your thoughts on the future of funding and sustainability for community-based archives. Your voice will be needed as well to help address these issues. Please comment on this post or reach out on Twitter.

Let the People Lead: Supporting Sustainability vs Dependency Models for Funding Community-Based… was originally published in Sustainable Futures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On December 26, 2017 the Library of Congress announced it would no longer be collecting all tweets, moving away from an agreement originally signed with Twitter in 2010. Since much of the writing about the library’s decision has not included the voices of archivists, I thought it would be important to weigh in. The Library of Congress’ new policy is to now be selective in their decision making about what tweets to collect, stating in the white paper released with the announcement: “tweets collected and archived will be thematic and event-based, including events such as elections, or themes of ongoing national interest, e.g. public policy.” This is what archivists call appraisal by the way, a core activity in our profession, and it’s what should have been happening all along with the Twitter archive.

Brad Houston still wants Nazis banned on Twitter

No one could have predicted that the LOC Twitter project was unsustainable, except for literally every archivist

But let’s set that aside for a moment. This was the right decision by the Library of Congress and I am fine with it for several reasons. First, archiving Twitter and social media in general, should be a broad community effort. The problem is literally too big for one institution to handle. Ed Summers, who worked on the original infrastructure to bring the Twitter collection to the Library of Congress, wrote about some of the policy, technical, and management issues that hindered the development of the collection from the beginning. Additionally there is a large community of people interested in figuring out how to best archive Twitter and other social media platforms. Why not focus more attention and resources on leveraging their energy and creativity to help develop accessible tools and ethical practices that can be widely adopted to do this sort of work. An example of this growing community can be seen in the Documenting the Now Slack channel which currently has over 350 members who have an interest in social media archiving. Archiving social media content should be a shared professional and community responsibility because it not only stretches our resources further, but it can also help to ensure that the records we end up creating are more representative of marginalized people.

The second reason I am ok with the Library of Congress’ decision is because a lack of staff diversity coupled with this myth of neutrality in the library/archives profession, can negatively impact the collections we build in terms of inclusiveness. A federal institution where the diversity of the staff who would be making decisions about the collection and one with a long history of issues around diversity and discrimination, probably shouldn’t be the sole entity we rely on for preserving the records of a social media platform like Twitter, and especially because its users are largely by Black and Hispanic people. This is important because we know that people of color and other marginalized communities, have influenced how the platform is used. They’ve helped to define it’s impact on our culture in several ways including how we understand activism in this moment, cultural expression, and surveillance of people of color online. Several scholars have written about the use of social media platforms by African Americans. Check out André Brock, Meredith Clark, Deen Freelon, Sarah Florini, Catherine Knight Steele, and Sarah Jackson. You can also check out the talks and the tweets from the recently held Digital Blackness in the Archive symposium where several scholars of black history and culture and cultural heritage professionals described their work with social media.

What does the Library of Congress Twitter collection look like, even after they bring appraisal into their process, if the people designing the systems and building the collection don’t understand the impact of the platform on and for communities of color, and how to translate that knowledge to inform their collection development practices? The lives of marginalized people are more visible and more vulnerable on the web and social media, making it even more important that these communities be involved in how their histories are preserved. This is especially vital at a time when we’ve seen all kinds of cultural moments by and about people of color amplified, appropriated, or surveilled on platforms like Twitter. These include instances of black cultural expression or moments such as #oscarssowhite, #blackwomenatwork, #ferguson, #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, #blackgirlmagic, #blackjoy, #sandrabland, #drawingwhileblack, among others.

If their work is not considered, will scholars of black digital culture be able to support their research on social media using the the Library of Congress’ Twitter collection if it doesn’t prioritize these topics? Some of which are not viewed by huge segments of our population to have any national interest of significance.

thot leader on Twitter

Hmmm. i wonder how much Black Twitter content is in here https://t.co/vmVKoGIbWs

There are other reasons to be ok with this decision by the Library of Congress. The library is an extremely politicized institution and it’s not independent from meddling by Congress. After all, it is their library. What impact might that relationship have on the Twitter collection as far as who gets access and how the collection grows, especially in our current political climate where social media has a heightened relevance? One just has to look at the drama around the use of the “illegal alien” subject heading a few years ago to understand that there are people outside of library’s walls who can significantly influence the decisions made there.

Additionally, the library cannot collect and preserve Twitter or any other social media for all communities. We are in a moment when marginalized people are increasingly attempting to document themselves. It would be useful to spend some time figuring out how to build tools and provide support for community-based archives, activists groups, or native people who want to document their own communities on social media and the web based on their own values. We should continue to acknowledge that different communities might want to preserve different parts of Twitter and other social media platforms and the library may not be the right place to lead that work, which is why an inclusive community effort is necessary. For example, the collecting priorities around social media for the Dusable Museum, Transgender Archive, South Asian American Digital Archive, Shorefront Legacy Center, San Bernardino County Museum, or the Sherman Indian School Museum might be different from the Library of Congress’ priorities. It’s important to consider how the needs of these types of spaces might be impacted if the library is the only trusted space where platforms like Twitter are archived, especially when you consider the intention behind Twitter’s decision to restrict access only to “bona fide” researchers in the original agreement it signed with the library. If the collection was ever made open and that policy was followed, how would it have been implemented and what impact would those decisions have on the scholarship produced from the collection?

There are of course several projects trying to address issues of inclusivity around social media and web archiving. Their efforts include developing tools to broaden the scope of who can do the collecting and also fostering communities of practice where issues such as ethics and accessibility are prioritized. Projects like Documenting the Now, Webrecorder, and Social Feed Manager are all attempting to address how we can better collect and preserve our shared digital cultural heritage. These efforts are helping to create a more inclusive and thoughtful practice that I believe can eventually lead to more representative collections of social media and web archives. It might be useful for the Library of Congress to explore how some of these tools could support public access to the tweets that it does intend to keep. I think these projects would be eager to support that work.

If you’re interested in contributing to the conversation social media archiving and how ethical practices should influence that work, please join the growing community on the Documenting the Now project Slack.

We’re all Bona Fide was originally published in On Archivy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.