Quick Start Guide for a Community Archive
The community-archive process has lots of moving pieces. We’ll outline the whole thing, start to finish, in really rough simple terms here so that the more detailed documentation that follows makes more sense.
1. Getting Started (Pre-Event Planning)
Figuring out what your goals are for your community’s archive–what your community’s needs are, what history you have to preserve, and how you can all work together to plan a community-archiving event–is the biggest part of any community-archive project. A few questions will help you get started.
- Who is in your community?
- Who are your community organizers?
- are their needs?
- What are they good at?
- Where can you all host an event that gives you enough room to take photos of things that are important to the community and do interviews with community members about their experiences?
- When can you hold your event and how will you let people know about it? Is there an existing event (street fair, homecoming, etc.) that brings your community together already? Who might volunteer to help?
2. Doing Community Interviews (During the Event)
Once you’ve got a set of shared goals and an event date set, you’ll need to think about how to photograph objects, record interviews, and then save those recordings and photos with all the info you need to make a web site. Having set stations that each contributor visits can help manage the chaos
- Check-in, where contributors meet a guide who will walk around with them as they do their interview and get photos of their object.
- Digitization and Photography, where volunteers help contributors take photos of objects or scans of paper documents and photos
- Oral History Interviews, where contributors do a quick interview about their object
- Checkout, where contributors can confirm they still want to be part of the community archive
3. Working with Community Objects and Interviews (Post-Event Clean-Up)
Now that you have a boatload of photos and interviews in digital form, you’ll want to make sure you have the right info about each object and can connect that object back to the person who brought it. That means
- naming files consistently
- editing transcripts of the interviews to make sure people who struggle to hear can read the interviews
- editing photos
- sending community members the cleaned-up copies of their files