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- Title
"May They Reminisce Over You": Toward Community-Based Archival Storytelling.
- Authors
Margolies, Robin
- Abstract
Memory workers, inside and outside of archives, increasingly seek to confront the ongoing legacies of oppression and colonialism within the institutions in which they work--to question and reframe whose stories are best told and from what perspective users are encouraged to approach them. This paper proposes community-based archival storytelling as a framework building on community-based research methods and emerging theory concerned with archival storytelling. Community-based archival storytelling, through shifting approaches to description and access, seeks to transform the dominance of provenance and the boundaries of engagement with communities connected to archival holdings. The paper situates the intervention within critiques of Library and Information Studies (LIS) practices and argues for a conception of ritual/rupture. For a case study, this article explores the author's design of a proposed community research project of a collection at La MaMa Archives. It argues for transforming the process of digitizing cultural heritage into an opportunity to reshape the collection in accordance with principles of participatory archiving. It theorizes methods of engaging and partnering with Jeannette Bastian's "community of records" connected to different performances held by La MaMa, taking up the call by Anne Gilliland and Sue McKemmish to "reposition the subjects of records and all others involved or affected by the events documented in them as participatory agents"(Bastian, 2003; Gilliland & McKemmish, 2015). By taking up the call for participatory archives, it advocates for the benefits of the practices of reminiscing and oral history to complement web-driven or more technologically oriented solutions often linked with participatory efforts. Anticipating the needs of the artists and community elders implicated within and involved as cocreators of these records, it integrates aspects of emerging models of continuum informatics and participatory appraisal with the professional practices of oral history and reminiscing work. It examines possibilities for integrating Leisa Gibbons Mediated Recordkeeping model with Jeffrey Dean Webster's Heuristic Model of Reminiscing.
- Subjects
COMMUNITY informatics; STORYTELLING; CULTURAL property; REMINISCENCE; INFORMATION retrieval
- Publication
Journal of Community Informatics, 2019, Vol 15, Issue 1, p22
- ISSN
1712-4441
- Publication type
Article