Community-Centered Collecting: Finding Out What Communities Want from Community Archives

摘要

While much recent work on community archives assumesrnthat independent, grassroots archival organizations betterrnmatch the priorities and needs of local communities thanrnmainstream government or university repositories, littlernempirical work has been done to confirm this assumption.rnThis study begins to remedy this gap by exploring what onernsubgroup of users of one community archive (the SouthrnAsian American Digital Archive or SAADA) would like tornsee the archive collect through a content analysis ofrnresponses given by South Asian American undergraduatesrnto the questions of what they wish to know more about theirrngrandparents’ generation and what they would like theirrngrandchildren to know about them. The analysis uncoveredrnseveral key themes about the past of interest to thernsubpopulation: information about specific relatives, majorrnhistorical events in South Asia, economic, cultural, andrnracial barriers their parents or grandparents faced when theyrncame to the U.S., and reasons for leaving South Asia. It alsornuncovered several areas that participants would like futurerngenerations to know about the present: social justicernactivism, blending two cultures, struggling to fit in as arnminority, the impact of technological change, andrndiscrimination in the wake of September 11, 2001. Basedrnon these findings, some key collection priorities arernsuggested for SAADA to better match community needs.