Subject area: Community-centred and culturally informed approach to building digital collections

Format: Online course with downloadable workbook 

Length: 2 hours

Audience: GLAMR professionals, librarians

Organisers: OCLC, WebJunction

 

Reflection:

The primary objective of this course is to be able to devise a plan for a community-centred approach for digital collections through uncovering stories and voices that have been left out, connecting with the full diversity of community groups, and engaging in respectful collaboration to build and sustain trust and engagement with communities. As an aspiring public librarian with various intersections of my identity being diverse and marginalised, this course spoke to me on a personal and political level. Throughout my studies the focus remained on digital stewardship for preservation and access to materials, however this course brought in practical strategies of relationship building with communities to tell their full story and cocreate an authentic shared historic record.

I more deeply explored the concept of memory as a collaborative phenomenon that shapes and defines a community and the complexity of what makes a community. I reflected on my potential role in a public library as a steward for collective memory and curating digital collections. The project of building a community archive that reflects the past and present of the local community starts with identifying the dominant narratives in the current collection and challenging the norm of librarians and archivists leading decisions on whose stories get documented. It is a comprehensive process of listening to the various stories, perspectives and opinions of the local community, inviting them into meaningful discussion of what they need, want and expect to see from a community archive. I learned a community-centred approach to building a community archive involves an ethic of care which means thinking about daily steps of culturally safe and affirming spaces to build meaningful and sustainable relationships with diverse groups.

A community-centred approach also involves a process of critically examining what stories and voices are dominant and which voices have been marginalised. From my own experience working in public libraries, local history collections predominantly represent white Australians and early European and British settler history. A local history collection needs to reflect the diversity of the community, which includes the immigration stories and histories of multiple groups to the area. This includes marginalised perspectives such as LGBTQIA+ that have largely been erased.

Finally, building networks and connections with diverse communities is a major step in redirecting and reorienting towards a more inclusive and authentic community archive. This involves taking stock of your existing relationships and bridges to new connections, practicing intentional outreach from a place of genuine curiosity where you need to practice active listening, be able to see the whole person to hear their story, and to move at a pace that is thoughtful, steady and patient to ensure that a community member has agency and control over the process.

The workbook activities allowed me to come up with my own ideas for a community I believed was underrepresented. I envisaged and wrote down strategies for connecting with a Bengali patron, how I would start the conversation, use openness and curiosity to gain a sense of their story and desire to see themself reflected in a community archive. I found this course very interesting and useful in offering a great number of practical strategies, approaches and frameworks that made concrete the process of embarking on such a challenging and meaningful project.