What is a community archivist?

Anyone can be a community archivist. If you have a passion or drive to preserve the history of your family and the people within your community we encourage you to become a community archivist. So many people within marginalized communities do not understand that our history is important and worth documenting or they do not have the resources to preserve their own archives. As practicing archivists within an institutional archive, every day we see the evidence of the erasure of communities of color, and as people of color, we understand how an archive can provide so much history and context when speaking about the history of communities across Arizona. Which is why we want to encourage everyone to become community archivists, a role one can learn by attending events we regularly host that teach communities that have historically been erased from archives about the importance of their history. 

When speaking about community archivists, there are many ways it can be described.  A community archivist can be a reference to someone who does memory work within communities. The best way to define this term is to examine what people think about when they think about the word “community” and the word “archivist.” Communities can encompass a single person or hundreds of people. An archivist is a person who performs certain tasks involving the curation of documents. So, a community archivist is a person, or people, who creates or accumulates materials by a person, or people, within a community group that documents the shared cultural heritage and experiences of that person, or people, within that community group.    

Learn more about how you can become involved in community archives through the Community-Driven Archives webpage or please consider joining the Arizona State University (ASU) Community Advisory Committee. If you are a student at ASU, please consider joining the Student Advisory Committee both links are provided here.

Contact me, Jessica Salow, with feedback at Jessica.Salow@asu.edu, as I would love to hear from you your thoughts regarding the work we here at ASU are doing in community archiving around Arizona. We also want your feedback on what you would like to see from us in future blog posts. Next week’s post will talk about why community archiving within marginalized communities is so important. See you next week!