This is a recorded flash session from the 2024 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. In this session, attendees will be empowered and inspired to work more closely with community collecting initiatives in their vicinity and beyond. Learn from staff from the Maryland Center for History and Culture’s H. Furlong Baldwin Library, who are exploring how shared stewardship and flexible agreements in community archiving initiatives across the country provide community groups ongoing ownership, voice, and active participation in the archiving of their words, stories, and images. Panelists will present recent findings from this work and share recommendations for meaningful engagement and collaboration with communities through an equity-based approach to collecting.

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Museums and Community Archiving A Collaborative Approach Slides

Transcript

Martina Kado: So welcome to today’s flash session on museums and community archiving, a collaborative approach. My name is Martina Kado. I’m the Vice President of Research and Director of the Library at the Maryland Center for History and Culture.

I will tell you a little bit about us in a hot minute. So, I’m going to tell you something about the organization and something about our project. You know, what the background was, what our goals were, and what we found during our research, and then what potential next steps might be. And I’m hoping that some of you might have ideas and would like to partner up on following up.

And then we might have questions. Time for questions. I’m hoping I’ll keep an eye on time, so if not I’m around, I have business cards, we can all talk to each other.

So, the Maryland Center for History and Culture was founded in 1844 as the Maryland Historical Society. That’s probably the easiest way to describe where I work and what we do. So, between our 7 million items in the library collections and 350 ,000 objects in our museum collection, we have been collecting, preserving, and making accessible Maryland history for about 180 years. And we are located in the historic neighborhood of Mount Vernon right here in Baltimore.

Some of you may have already attended some of our events. We’re hosting experiential workshops. The CEO Summit is happening with us today, so there’s a couple of things happening. And if you haven’t paid us a visit, we’re still open today, so please do, I’d be happy to have you there. A couple of examples of what we have and what we do. On the left is an item from our library collection.

It is the astronomical journal of Benjamin Banneker, a lot of you know about him. He is the astronomer, the mathematician, self -taught, freeborn African American who studied eclipses, Also, Cicadas, we have two broods descending upon us this year, so he will be very relevant again this year. And on the right is an exhibition that we hosted last year in collaboration with the Museum of the Moving Image from New York.

Kermit was in the house for about six months, so it was Muppet extravaganza all around. So, we do all of these things, and why Maryland? Because Jim Henson studied at the University of Maryland in College Park, so there’s a Maryland connection between Jim Henson and us.

And some of you who might remember this, if you were in Baltimore for the AM of 1993, when we had the Mining the Museum exhibition open. So as a collaboration between the then Maryland Historical Society and the contemporary, Fred Wilson put together an installation called Mining the Museum, which is still studied in museum studies and talked about to this day, so we’re proud of that one.

Okay, introduction is over. Let me skip to our project. Tell you a little bit about that. This was a grant that was funded by the Society of American Archivists Foundation that we received, that we implemented between October last year and this April.

Some aspects of it are still ongoing, and this presentation is actually part of it, so I’m excited about that. Our goal with this grant, with this project, was to learn more about successful collaborations between community archives and institutions such as ours.

Two specific things that we wanted to hear more about were stewardship and custody agreements, and then what arrangements were made in these partnerships to empower communities to have more active roles in the preservation of their own histories.

In terms of projects, activities, and deliverables, we proposed to research and compile resources on community archiving, meaning scholarly articles, books, websites, blogs, toolkits that pertain to this specific activity. And then we conducted interviews, the proposal was between five and ten representatives of community archives that actively collaborated with an institution.

And finally, we wanted to put all of that in a single research report and share the project results. So right now, we are between bullet point number three and four. The research report has been written. It is in final stages of editing, and it’s been reviewed. It’s fine. It looks really good. I’m proud of it. And this is the premiere of our project’s results. So, I’m really excited to be here today to talk about them for the first time in public.

Thank you. So, we will be publishing the report on our website. And so we do have a sign -up sheet here for after the session.

If you’re interested in being notified when it publishes, please leave me your name and your contact information. I’ll gladly put you on our distribution list because I want this to be shared far and wide.

So that’s where we are with the project right now. I also need to give a shout -out to the wonderful team who worked on this, And the first and most important person I want to mention here is Caitlyn Lurch, our research fellow. Caitlyn is a student of museum studies at Johns Hopkins University who joined us for the duration of this project and did the bulk of the work.

So, she did the research of secondary sources, she conducted the interviews, and she wrote the majority of the research reports. So big shout out to Caitlyn. She was here yesterday. Some of you might have met her. She was volunteering, too, so yay, Caitlin. And then the two other people, Sandra Glasscock and Christopher Redwood, are members of our library and publications teams, respectively, so that was the expertise that they provided on the archival side of things and just publishing research. I served as the primary investigator on the project.

So, community archiving is such a fluid and dynamic and wonderful field, but we had to start with a kind of definition. So, we chose the one that is on the Society of American Archivists website, which says that community archiving is documentation of a group of people that share common interests and social, cultural, and historical heritage, usually created by members of the group being documented and maintained outside of traditional archives, so that last bit is, of course, very important.

I should also say you probably have encountered other terms, and maybe you use other terms, synonymous with community archives, such as community memory projects, grassroots archives, community -based archives. And what I want to say here is that we saw community archiving on a spectrum. Where on the one hand, they could be embedded in collections at organizations such as MCHC and managed by the organization, two on the other end being completely independent, entirely owned and managed by the communities. There’s a lot of research done on both, but not a lot of research done on the space in between, which is what we were curious about.

So how we can work together and how we can help communities achieve what they want to achieve with the resources and the expertise that we have. This next slide contains a lot of information and I want to break it down, but this is a list of the archives and their representatives that we were able to interview for this project so I’m really thankful to all of these wonderful people who took the time to share their experience and their expertise with us. So, the first item is, you know, the name of the archive. Then secondly, we have the names of the individuals that we interviewed. And in parentheses, I entered the names of the participating institutions. So, you know, who partnered with whom and what the title of the project was.

All together, we interviewed 11 individuals representing eight archives, so this is a qualitative project, it’s not a quantitative study, we do not claim to be representative of the field in any way and that could be part of our next steps conversation.

So how do I break this down for you? So, I think our approach can be best described as in spatial terms of concentric circles. So, we started with ourselves and if you look of the Preserve the Baltimore Uprising Archive Project.

That is something that we participated in. We partnered up with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and had our own experience of that. We had another responsive collecting initiative during COVID that we initiated ourselves. So, we had some experiences and conceptions that we wanted to explore. Our next concentric circle, If you look at the Baltimore Reservation Project and the Chesapeake Heartland and African American Humanities Project, these projects are Baltimore and Eastern Shore of Maryland based, so we expanded that circle to include our region and the people that we already knew. And then finally, we did want a national reach for this project, so it was really important to me to have variety in terms of geographical location, in terms of the size of the archive, and in terms of the themes that they covered and the communities that they engaged.

So, we try to do that as best as we could, you know, within the limitations of the grant, of the timeline, and just, you know, building that rapport for people to share with you. So I’m really proud that we were able to include the Mass or Massachusetts Memories Roadshow, the Rhode Island LGBTQ + Community Archive, the Plateau People’s Web Portal, Routed, a community archive project, and the Southeast Asian archive.

The interviews were semi structured, so every interviewee was given a list of 12 questions in advance to the interview. And the questions addressed, you know, the topic of their archive, when did it get started, what need or desire it fulfilled, what types of collaboration they had with the community, what custodial arrangements and agreements they were able to put together, and their biggest successes and their biggest challenges that they could identify for us. So, the first thing that becomes apparent when you look at this list, I’m spending a lot of time on this list, is that the nature of the partnering institutions. So, it’s not a quantitative study, but it’s pretty obvious that the majority of the participating institutions are colleges and universities. Mostly libraries, and in one case of Chesapeake Heartland, it was another unit within the university that was dedicated to history and social research.

Two of the archives partnered with a public library, one was public library and the other one was us as the oddballs, a history and culture organization or nonprofit organization, if you will.

So in terms of results, what did we find? What did we hear from our interviewees? As we go through the next several slides, what I will focus on is ways in which what we call traditional methods of collecting and archiving were modified in these collaborations.

So, there’s a lot to share and there will be a whole research report with more details about each project, but I’m going to try and make it condensed for you here. So, all of the archives either digitized or collected, born digital and /or digitized content. Two of the archives that we interviewed did provide physical space as well for either collecting and /or exhibiting the collections, the items that were donated. And the types of content that was collected or digitized included everything from photographs to audio and /or video recordings, such as songs or family movies, oral histories, ephemera, to personal documents, such as journals or even medical records.

Two of the archives included not just collecting, but creating new content, which is really interesting to hear, such as time capsules or new pieces of art or remixed content from existing recordings. I was able to hear some of this and it was really exciting.

So, I mentioned custodial agreements and arrangements as being part of our interest here. They varied by archive, but the majority typically had some sort of a deed of gift or digital release form in place with modifications that allowed the original owner or owners to request the return of materials or to amend the archived description.

Most of the archives also left the archival description and the story behind the items donated to the hands of the community rather than, you know, the archivist taking over and writing the description themselves, which is what they traditionally do. Digital content for most archives did not include keeping the physical material received, so it was digitized and typically returned to the donor, though I mentioned that two of the archives did have a physical space where people could leave their donated items and where they could be accessed and viewed by the public.

The other bullet point that we have here is sensitive content. So, three of the archives that we spoke to experienced having to deal with how to handle sensitive content. And sensitive content means medical records. How do you handle that? What do you share? Whose consent do you seek? Or potentially incriminating photographs or information, something that could be used in a potential criminal prosecution of an individual and in these cases, they consulted with communities they all reported having regular meetings with staff and with community members. One archive actually set up an advisory board with community members present who helped steer these decisions and in some cases legal consultation was had as well. So, these are some things to keep in mind if you are considering collaborating with a community archive. These are questions that you’re going to encounter.

So, in terms of, again, what we found when it comes to collaboration, you know, what did the institutions contribute? And maybe you’re wondering, you know, what do we have in terms of expertise, what do we have in terms of space that we can offer to community archives? We were able to identify a lot of things. Number one is physical space for storing and exhibiting items or for collecting events. So, the image that we have here is a photograph that we’re using with permission of a wonderful community collecting event that was held at the Baltimore American Indian Center in April earlier this year and it pretty much embodies everything that we’re talking about here.

So, this is an oral history taking place, being recorded. My favorite thing about it is the intergenerational aspects. So, both of these individuals are members of the Lumbee tribe. And Mr. Carl is a favorite elder among the community and beyond. And then I love the breaking of the fourth wall where you’re filming the filming of the oral history. So, you see what’s happening there.

Other things that institutions contributions and can contribute are digitization, digitizing, photographs, documents, recordings. You can help with intake and processing of submitted collections.

You can help with collection management or co -management with the community. Some are able to provide web hosting of the digitized material or the material that was submitted.

And finally, and this goes beyond the interview, I had a conversation with the Maryland State Archives about this, for example, a lot of them offer training in terms of all of these things, you know, from digitization to archive processing to even grant writing. So that’s, you know, it’s something that you do for yourself as an organization. You could offer it to other people too because you have the skill set. When it comes to challenges, and I am rushing a little bit because we’re pressed for time here, I feel like funding, staffing, and institutional trust could probably be mentioned in every session in this conference, and I’ve heard them mentioned, and also with the trust, we’re looking toward AAM’s next theme for next year in Los Angeles, you know, museums and trust.

So, they were premises for us as much as they were findings, you know, we expected to hear about these things, and we did. So, the beauty of qualitative research is that we were able to hear how these things affected, you know, these partnerships, not just the what or that they had a problem. So financial sustainability is something that was mentioned by almost all of the archives and institutions were able to help because, you know, the funding system is such that you have to have that institutional access to a grant application or an institutional affiliation to get the funding. But the fact remains that continuous application for funding is draining for staff and it needs to keep happening in order for the archives to be sustainable.

In terms of staffing, we heard about understaffing and staff turnover as the biggest issues, which I know we’re all familiar with understaffing, but the staff turnover was really interesting. I’m going to read you a quote from the research report that says, “Former employees may not have had time to train replacements and replacements may not have chosen to take on the work of their predecessors.” So this was such an important finding for me because it spoke to the organic nature of these projects where for whatever reason it didn’t sound like they were able to be made institutional priorities. And if they were, they would be somebody assigned to it, right? It would keep happening. So, you know, in terms of staffing, there’s that to work on.

And finally, trust, again, we’re having a whole conference next year about museums and trust, so I won’t go into detail. But our experience in, you know, these successful partnerships, interviewing successful partnerships was that the majority of the archives had very little, if any, issue with trust and there are reasons why some of them operated in small or close -knit communities where there were already existing connections or there was already existing collaboration or there was a community member who was also an employee or an employee who was also a community member so there was that initial connection building that that helped spark the project Of course, the caveat is that we did select the projects that we interviewed. This is not a random representative sample. So, there’s no way for us to know how bad certain experience might have been for some other people, you know, or what those would have looked like. So, that’s something for next steps.

But interacting with the community before creating the archive and Containing that report or a continued presence in the community just showing up for the community is is really important for sustainability.

How are we with time?

Okay? We have some time Next steps So when this research report is published and it will be in the next month One of our goals or our hope for it is to be that it could be used in further advocacy.

So, if you’re having a conversation with your leadership who are on the fence about do we want to commit to this? What are the values of this? I’m hoping that you can go to this report and cite either parts of it or the entire publication, you know, as you have that conversation. It could be used as support for funding applications too. You know, we all knew that funding and staffing and trust would be an issue, but there’s value in documenting how and why and having this be a 2024 publication. When somebody tells you there’s a new study confirming that sleep deprivation shortens your lifespan, we’re like, yeah, we all knew that, but it still needs to be documented and there’s value in having that documented. In terms of further research, I feel like we just scratched the surface with this, you know, within what we were able to do with this grant and just the eight archives that we were able to interview. Every aspect that I spoke about today could probably be drilled down into.

So, number one, if anybody wanted to partner up or do a quantitative state -of -the -field snapshot, that would be absolutely fabulous. I think all of us would love to know how many archives there are, their geographical distribution themes that they cover or you know subjects around which they gather and then everything else that we mentioned today you know drilling down into the types of submitted materials or what would they collect a further more detailed study of custodial agreements and are there more you know varied types of documentation that we haven’t touched on yet forms of collaboration with communities resources of funding, which are more prevalent or less prevalent, and why, which are most helpful and why. And then again, the types of institutions, that’s something that I was really intrigued by, that there seems to be a certain sector that is devoted or has the resources and the ability to help. So how do we empower them to keep doing that, you know?

Finally, as we look at the acknowledgments of all the wonderful people who participated in this project in addition to the Society of American Archivist Foundation funding it and as you think about potential questions because we might have a minute or two to answer them I just want to end on a commemorative note that this conference is happening in Baltimore and that in March the city experienced a tragedy of you know our beloved Key Bridge collapsing and the loss of six lives. The historical and cultural and arts community has responded by, of course, wanting to collect.

So, we’re part of these conversations. There has been a call put out that goes back to the building of the bridge. So, everybody who was, you know, somehow part of the life of this bridge is invited to participate.

And these questions of how do we ethically approach, you know, such projects with sensitivity, being mindful and thoughtful about who is affected and who collects what and under what circumstances, it becomes just all the more important. So it’s really, really, it really matters to me that that we single that moment out today. So, yes, I’m gonna give you my contacts here.

I do have business cards and I have that sign -up sheet if anybody wants to, but we have, I want to say, two or three minutes for questions. If anybody wants to, is the mic up? I think you can come up to the microphone or just speak really loudly, whatever your preference is.

Yes?

>>

Can I just ask if somebody who’s not in the museum is, I see them as partners, so in this very limited research, we did not encounter many museums, or we were the only example that we could think of that was a partner.

I feel like there’s much more potential here, and there are networks that we could reach out to find out more information. So again, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t mean that these projects are not happening. I feel like it’s an untapped potential there. So, I know that there were a lot of conversations about moral histories in the sessions here. All of it ties together. There’s a lot of conversation about communities and how to empower them in having control over how their life stories and communal histories are preserved and shared. I think it just all speaks to the same thing. It’s all pieces of the same puzzle.

>>

Yes, I’m not familiar with such an example,

but we are in conversation with organizations, schools specifically outside of this project who are embarking on doing such a thing.

And so even though this is not a community archive, the proposition is that as they go through their collections, they’re actually asking us if we would be willing to take some of them into our collection and they could move and re -house the rest.

So again, that’s outside of community archiving, but such conversations are in place. Great question. Yes. Yes.

>> [ Inaudible ]

One of the archives that we interviewed, the Mass Memories Roadshow, they modeled their name after the Antiques Roadshow, and it was a challenge for our editing because it was like one word, two words, antiques is one, this is two, it’s really interesting.

But yes, a lot of them rely on these community events or traveling, that was a theme that we actually discovered of mobility, of meeting people where they are. A couple of the archives, some are featured in our interviews and some are not, have a truck, you know, a mobile unit that serves as a collecting space, as an exhibition space, as a performance space. I saw backpack archivist kits that could be borrowed from a couple of places. One of them was unfortunately, well, unfortunately, it was a great project, but it was completed because, you know, it had a grant. But I think the Pratt Library here in Baltimore has an oral history kit that you can also borrow and take to your community. So, there’s that theme of mobility and making this accessible and just approachable.

Thank you all so very much.

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This recording is generously supported by The Wallace Foundation.