We are pleased to announce that the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP), the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) and the UCLA Community Archives Lab have been awarded a three-year, $750,000 grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to support the project, “Virtual Belonging: Assessing the Affective Impact of Digital Records Creation in Community Archives.” This grant provides funding for TAVP and SAADA to sponsor fellows who will collect oral history interviews from their community, and for the partner organizations to develop research and tools that center the experiences and needs of contributors to community-based archives like TAVP and SAADA. The goal of this work is to improve services for community members–particularly those from underrepresented communities–who create records for community-based archives. The project will also have a significant impact for libraries, museums, and archives interested in practicing an ethics of care that center the needs, agency, and dignity of donors, users, and record creators in order to mitigate potential harms or risks to the communities we serve, especially in the context of violence, trauma, and grief.
The grant offers support for TAVP’s Visions After Violence Fellows, and for SAADA’s Archival Creators Fellows over the next three years (additional support has been provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). The Visions After Violence Fellowship provides an opportunity for people who have been directly impacted by state violence to contribute to community-based documentation and archival work, including through the collection of oral histories. The Archival Creators Fellowship supports fellows with collecting oral histories and other archival materials from their communities for inclusion in the archive (click these links to learn about this year’s Archival Creators Fellows and Visions After Violence Fellows.) Over the course of the grant’s three years, these fellows will collect dozens of oral history interviews with members of their communities.
The community participants will be invited to take part in focus groups and interviews with researchers at UCLA’s Community Archives Lab in order to share the impact of creating records and contributing them to an archive. The UCLA researchers are also interested in studying how it feels to do oral history work in an online format, which has quickly become the standard of these pandemic times. The interviews conducted by the Community Archives Lab will inform the creation of new resources to be made available to community archives across the country.
Our hope is that this work will collectively allow community-based archives to better serve those in our communities who create and contribute records to archives. This crucial memory work now increasingly takes place in a remote digital setting, providing an opportunity for generating new tools and resources that center the perspectives of those who have shared their stories with us. We look forward to sharing this work with you as it progresses, so stay tuned.
