Community Defining Archives: A comparative view of community archives definitions

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies Volume 12 Article 11 2025 Community Defining Archives: A comparative view of community archives definitions Britney Bibeault University of Maryland at College Park, Follow this and additional works at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas Part of the Archival Science Commons Recommended Citation Bibeault, Britney (2025) "Community Defining Archives: A comparative view of community archives definitions," Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: Vol. 12, Article 11. Available at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol12/iss1/11 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies by an authorized editor of EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact . Community Defining Archives: A comparative view of community archives definitions Cover Page Footnote This article was originally written as the Integrative Paper milestone for University of Maryland's College of Information to reach candidacy. Thank you to my committee Paul Jaeger (chair), Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, Eric Hung, Beth St. Jean, and Irene Pasquetto for the invaluable feedback and support. This article is available in Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol12/ iss1/11 Bibeault: Community Defining Archives COMMUNITY DEFINING ARCHIVES: A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF COMMUNITY ARCHIVES DEFINITIONS Positionality Statement I am a white woman in my mid-twenties. I have a BA in history and a BA in anthropology from Northern Arizona University (2020) and an MLIS and Archival Studies Certificate from the University of Arizona (2022). I worked at Northern Arizona’s Special Collections and Archives during my undergraduate programs where I gained invaluable experience processing collections. All my experiences led me to pursue a PhD in Information to study how and why community archives are created. Specifically, I have an interest in changing the current narrative of the histories of and reasons why people began doing community archiving. I am also interested in creating policies with community archives to ensure they are not taken advantage of by mainstream institutions. Introduction In community archives literature, scholars often begin their descriptions of community archives with an explanation of there being no accepted definition of the term. As a student, I found this to be confusing as most of the articles I was reading on the subject were in conversation with each other and all of them successfully described the community archives they were studying, often describing multiple archives in the same article and highlighting their similarities. I became increasingly curious about the nature of community archives definitions, both in academic writing and in how community archivists describe themselves, as we need shared definitions to communicate with each other on any topic, especially complex ones. After reading Sarah Welland and Amanda Cossham’s article exploring this exact topic in academic literature and accepting their suggestion for a taxonomy approach to defining community archives, the question of how academic literature compared to practitioner self-descriptions arose.1 Based on these thoughts, the questions I aim to answer through this research are: What definitions do community archivists use to describe themselves or their work? How do academic and practitioner definitions of community archives and archiving compare? What, if any, are the similarities among the definitions of community archives in academic literature and how frequently do these similarities occur? And finally, are there differences between academic and practitioner definitions that could provide insight into how community archivists see their work versus how academics view and describe community archiving? In answering the above questions, I hope to provide insight into community archives and how academics and practitioners align on the topic to better understand where academics are supporting practitioner work, where they fall short of accurately representing them, and how the community archives field can move forward more holistically. This article begins with a review of the definitions of community archives provided in academic literature. Next, I describe the methods of qualitative thematic coding and quantitative word 1 Welland and Cossham. “Defining the Undefinable.” Published by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale, 2025 1 Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, Vol. 12 [2025], Art. 11 frequency. The findings of an existing, shared definition of community archives and the themes found within practitioner sources, namely those of futurity and access, are presented followed by a discussion connecting these findings to the literature. Lastly, the implications of the findings are discussed with an emphasis on how academics can better understand and represent community archives. Based on this research, I argue for a taxonomic approach to defining community archives and to use either the Andrew Flinn or the Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd definitions of community archives as the broadest definitions under which specific, nuanced definitions can exist. Additionally, I suggest that moving forward with a more robust understanding of how community archivists describe their work is integral for building new ways for academics to understand the broader world of archiving outside of mainstream institutions and recognizes the important work of community archivists. Definitions Because defining terms consisting of two complex parts is difficult and nuanced, much of the literature on community archives describe the wider discussions of defining “community” and “archives” separately before defining “community archives” as a whole. Here I solely focus on the definitions of “community archives” as a compound and complete concept. When discussing communities, I am referring to people who have a connection to each other, either chosen or imposed. I only refer to communities in relation to the community archives being described. Another important note on the definitions provided within this essay is the terminology used by community archives scholars to describe the types of archives they study. In most cases, “community archives” is used interchangeably with “community-based,” “independent community,” and “community-centered” archives, among other terms. The importance of these various terms is described within each article, and authors often justify why they chose to use one over the other or if they use multiple iterations within the same piece. For this research, the broad term “community archives” was chosen because it is the most common way to describe the practices and groups of peopl (...truncated)