Community Archives Collaborative

Getting Started

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Getting Started
Cultivating a Partnership
Sharing Community History
Teaching Tools
“Tools for Community Archives - Academic Relationships" offers support for creating partnership between community-based organizations and academic institutions. It includes guidance on student training, forms, digital projects, events, and maintaining positive relationships. Use the resource as needed, and explore different topics freely.


What is Community-Centered Archives Practice?

Community-centered archives come into being through collaborative partnerships between mainstream archival institutions and underrepresented communities in the historical record. The goal is to empower communities in the process of telling and preserving their own histories. Trust in a community’s expertise and lived experiences are considered the impetus for building impactful community-centered archives practice. In a community-centered archives partnership, mainstream archival institutions must be:
  • Collaborative through shared authority: In a community-centered approach, the institution focuses on shared authority, making decisions together, and respecting the value, expertise, and perspective brought to the partnership by the community.
  • Attentive to inequities reflected in archives: An institution should seek to understand how communities have been misrepresented, absent, or maligned in historical documentation.
  • Responsive to the community’s needs: An institution must be flexible, adaptable and take an iterative and ethical approach to responding to how community memory and evidence is preserved, described, and made accessible. This means bending and stretching how archival work is defined to reflect what matters to the community.
  • Engaged with the divergent priorities of communities: Community-institution partnerships must vary depending on the needs of each community, from the level of involvement by specific contributors to decisions about what archival material to collect.

Orange County & Southeast Asian Archives Center. 2025. "Community-Centered Archives Partnerships." University of California Irvine Libraries. https://ocseaa.lib.uci.edu/partnerships. Accessed Feb. 19, 2025.
Definitions

Institutional Special Collections/Archives:  A university, college, or other mainstream institution’s collections of material, as well as staff, primarily serving researchers. Many institutions provide access to the public. Archival materials are usually sought out or donated to the institution, but many institutional archives today also seek out non-custodial or post-custodial collaborations with CBAs and CBOs.

Community-Based Archives (CBA): A community-based archive is often an independently run non-profit organizations and/or independent memory workers that works to empower marginalized groups that mainstream archives have erased. A community-based archive may be run by an independent board of directors and may rely on volunteers' help to archive and record material. A community-based archive pays careful attention to underrepresented communities' inequalities, misunderstandings, and historical erasures. In other words, the community-based archives work to highlight the voices of communities that are not traditionally represented in archives.

Community-Based Organization (CBO): A community-based organization is typically a not-for-profit organization that does not necessarily include archives or memory-keeping as part of its mission or service model. A community-based organization is focused on protecting and providing services to marginalized groups in their local communities. CBOs may form partnerships with CBAs or institutional archives to conduct archival projects together.
About this Resource

“Tools for Community Archives - Academic Relationships” was created as part of consultative services provided by the Community Archives Collaborative for the University of California, Irvine Libraries  - Department of Special Collections & Archives, Orange County & Southeast Asian Archive Center in 2024

These web pages were built by UC Irvine under the advisement of the Community Archives Collaborative and, as a dynamic resource, are intended to be updated and improved over time as new resources become available to foster ethical, sustainable collaborations between mainstream archives and community-based archives (as well as community-based organizations doing archival projects.) It is imperative that community-based archives lead the way in defining what best serves them, including tools and methods for institutions seeking to work with them. This website is hosted and managed by the Community Archives Collaborative.

Thank you to the Community Archives Collaborative leads: Imani Altemus-Williams and Bacilio Mendez II. We would like to acknowledge the following people from UC Irvine who helped develop and design this resource, including: Krystal Tribbett, Julia Huỳnh, Audra Eagle Yun, Ashley Burke, Sean Claudio, and Rivka Arbetter. 

This resource was made possible in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through Grant 2105-10639. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities.