Locating the Black archive

This chapter takes the concept of ‘living heritage’ as a starting point to show the ways in which focusing on tangibility and intangibility, the formal and the informal, can be used to stretch the concepts of archival practice. It highlights the cultural and intellectual traditions, tangible and intangible, found within the Caribbean, Africa, and across the Diaspora. Accordingly, the institutions, organisations, concepts, and practices discussed here have a ‘pre-history’ both internationally and in the UK — a prehistory inseparable from the development of the intellectual and cultural history of African and Caribbean communities in the Diaspora. Despite this, an archival science capable of dealing with these complexities has yet to be developed. The chapter thus considers the ways in which Black-led archival practices in the UK have historically sought to both disrupt and define heritage practices. It makes a claim for the active, political and cultural incursions, disruptions, and interventions in the heritage sector by Black-led archives and heritage practitioners.

New island stories: heritage, archives, the digital environment and community regeneration

This chapter reflect on the author's experiences as the local partner lead for two University of Leeds-led projects. It explores what can be understood from them about the relationship between communities, digital heritage archives, institutions, and heritage engagement. Heritage (hi)stories, digital skills enhancement, and community empowerment are frequently cited ingredients in the mix of approaches to promoting community regeneration and development. Between October 2014 and March 2015, the two projects explored some of these themes with residents of the Isle of Bute, Scotland. Jointly, the projects brought together community, academic, institutional, and private sector partners to create new digital tools to support heritage-based community research and creative expression, and to further explore questions about heritage perception and digital engagement. Thus, this chapter discusses the meaningful contribution that projects such as Pararchive can make in the wider context of national ambitions for digitally engaged communities, and how project implementation might usefully be aligned with local communities in the future.

The digital citizen: working upstream of digital and broadcast archive developments

This chapter explores the potential and significance of digital broadcast archives (DBAs) and associated tools for supporting civic engagement with complex topics. It draws on a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, Earth in Vision, which worked with a sample of 50 hours of environment-themed broadcasts drawn from over five decades of BBC television and radio archives. The project critically examines the potential of such broadcast archive content as a resource for the making and debating of environmental histories in the context of imagining and planning for environmental futures. It builds on the principles of co-production and social learning and aims to support more plural and dynamic accounts of environmental change. The overarching question the project addresses is how digital broadcast archives can inform environmental history and support public understanding of, and learning about, environmental change issues.

Rising beyond museological practice and use: a model for community and museum partnerships working towards modern curatorship in this day and age

This chapter discusses effective ways to develop relationships between communities and museums around shared cultural agendas, practice, and knowledge exchange. Through the lens of an eight-month pilot that emerged from the Pararchive project and was partnered by the National Media Museum (NMeM), Bradford, the chapter addresses what it means to access a dormant but invaluable national archive and associative collections from the position of differently situated community groups. It highlights how the Pararchive–National Media Museum partnership (PNMeM) promoted opportunities for community groups to select, document, and creatively exploit archival resources in ways in which conventional museological practice and use do not allow. The chapter also outlines the key challenges encountered. In doing so, this chapter draws on detailed notes generated through participant observation, on the study of relevant documents and artefacts, and on important insights gained from audio recordings of relevant project meetings and an evaluative end-of-project workshop.

‘I’ve never told anybody that before’: the virtual archive and collaborative spaces of knowledge production

This chapter discusses the ‘virtual archives’ of community spaces and their potentials for collaborative, community-based knowledge production. It evaluates and problematises concepts of virtual archive engagement using a specific virtual archive project and a specific community as an illustrative case study. Experience Temple Works is a multisensory and participatory virtual archive of a Grade I listed building in South Leeds. It was intended to facilitate an analysis of the relationships between the vivid sensory experience of the building and the creative and cultural activities taking place within it. However, as this chapter attests, the project came to attain much greater social and academic impact through its later reconfiguration as a community-orientated platform for collaborative knowledge production. The overarching intention here is to explicate how new forms of virtual archive might challenge the power relationships historically associated with archives as privileged spaces of knowledge production, while simultaneously avoiding the many pitfalls associated with digitally mediated forms of experience and participation, both of which are well documented within the academic disciplines of new and digital media.

Doing-It-Together: citizen archivists and the online environment

This chapter first explores the motivations behind the creation of class as self-authorised sites of popular music heritage — those created and curated by citizen and activist archivists that are devoted to the archiving, preservation, and sharing of popular music heritage. It then turns to the use of social media platforms and the communities of interest that form online and who take a ‘Doing-It-Together’ approach to harvesting vast amounts of popular music materials and memories. Such platforms offer the opportunity or the celebration and sharing of obscure or niche music cultures. However, they also pose issues for their creators and those who may have an interest in participating or studying them. The loss of materials in the rapid ‘churn’; the lack of search, navigation, and retrieval functionality; the potential of technologies becoming redundant; and founders, owners, and administrators losing interest in their sites, all resulting in the loss of substantial numbers of musical memories, are just some of the issues that need to be addressed.

Archive utopias: linking collaborative histories to local democracy

This chapter explores how York's city archives can be used to open up different kinds of democratic relationships. It focuses on archival collections relating to Hungate, an area of York that was designated a ‘slum’ and demolished by the council during the 1930s. The chapter looks at health inspection records, explores maps and the 1911 census, and reads angry letters from people whose lives were being affected by local government decisions. Seeing the breakdown in relationships between local people and local government — and the way in which this is reflected in cynicism towards the council today — has led to the development of a conceptual intervention this chapter dubs the ‘Utopian Council’. The Utopian Council seeks to imagine and stage a more positive and reciprocal relationship between the council and local people.

Silver hair, silver tongues, silver screen: recollection, reflection and representation through digital storytelling with older people

This chapter discusses the use of Digital Storytelling (DS) with older people. It looks at the benefits of participation in the DS process before considering how these self-representations — organised, selected and told by individuals and shared on their terms — can break down traditional bureaucratic power structures represented by the notion of ‘archive’. The chapter presents two case studies. The first is from Patient Voices, which curates and archives digital stories made under its auspices with the intention of transforming health and social care by conveying the voices of those not usually heard to a worldwide audience. The second is from DigiTales's work with older people through the transnational action research project Silver Stories, which generated an archive of over 160 stories by older people and those who care for them, from five European countries. It shows how DS creates new possibilities for participatory and collaborative approaches to discovering and developing new knowledge, re-positioning participants as co-producers of knowledge and, potentially, as co-researchers.

Memories on film: public archive images and participatory film‑making with people with dementia

This chapter explores the use of images from local history archives in the co-construction of short individual films with people with dementia. The study on which the chapter is based was carried out with two men and eight women living in a housing-with-care facility in the northern United Kingdom. The chapter finds that archive images quickly took on a central role in the film narratives of several of the participants. In the process, the archive materials themselves were also transformed, memorialising the everyday spaces and places in which the participants had lived. In this study, archive images were often used to elicit memories of people, or places that no longer look the same in the present day. The chapter reveals that such images were often more recognisable to the participants than were contemporary photographs. This corresponds with research into the ‘reminiscence bump’, which suggests that autobiographical memory for the period between about five and thirty years of age remains well preserved in people living with dementia.

BBC Pebble Mill: issues around collaborative community online archives – a case study of the Pebble Mill Project

This chapter considers the Pebble Mill project. The project is a multi-media online resource, with social media interaction on Facebook, where members of an online community build an ‘idiosyncratic archive’ of memories and artefacts, including photographs, videos, audio, and written text, creating a democratic history of BBC Pebble Mill, which complements the BBC's institutional archive. Some of the tensions and limitations of community archive projects are explored, including moderation, ethics, and legal matters, namely defamation and copyright. One of the major challenges for community archives regards the continuing commitment of ‘citizen curators’, the facilitators of online community projects, whose labour includes devising policies, moderating, and encouraging engagement. Issues of longevity and sustainability are considered, along with the vulnerability of online collections in a precarious virtual world, where platforms are subject to evolution, or removal — threatening the survival of small projects.