Participatory Heritage

Community engagement and collaboration are topics of growing interest in the archives profession. The 2017 SAA Annual Meeting featured not just one session, but an entire day devoted to “envisioning and implementing a community-based approach to archives,” with an emphasis on communication, collaboration, and mutual influence between archivists and community groups.¹ This community-based approach is also the emphasis of Henriette Roued-Cunliffe and Andrea Copeland's Participatory Heritage.

As defined in the introduction, participatory heritage is “a space in which individuals engage in cultural activities outside of formal institutions for the purpose of knowledge sharing and co-creating with others” (p. xv). The authors posit a disconnect between the information organization expertise of archival repositories and the subject expertise of groups that informally document themselves, such as the ubiquitous “I Grew Up in [Hometown]” social media groups, fan subcultures, and wiki editors (p. xvii). In other scholarship, the term has a strong association with collaborations between repositories and community groups, including concepts like crowdsourcing and “town and gown” projects,² and especially the empowerment of those groups to remember and be remembered.³ These themes of collaboration and empowerment repeat throughout Participatory Heritage.

Editors Henriette Roued-Cunliffe and Andrea Copeland bring to bear on the book their expertise in repository-community collaboration, heritage data, and do-it-yourself cultures. Roued-Cunliffe is an associate professor at the Royal School of Library and Information Science at the University of Copenhagen, and her publications include studies of community heritage groups and the ways they build and share collections. Copeland is associate professor of library and information science at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, with a research focus on connecting communities with archival repositories. Chapters from Roued-Cunliffe and Copeland are joined by those of scholars and archivists from universities and repositories in the United States, Australia, Canada, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, providing an international cross-section of current archival practice. In all, nineteen short chapters, around ten pages each, describe collaborations between archivists and participatory heritage groups. Chapters are grouped into three sections—“Participants,” “Challenges,” and “Solutions.” Each chapter is intended to highlight a different aspect of each section's topic—the variety of participants in heritage projects, challenges common among projects, and common solutions presented by participatory heritage. This organizational approach is useful for the reader interested in each of those topics, or trying to relocate a chapter for a second or third perusal. However, it's worth noting that each essay, regardless of its proper section, presents its own unique participants, challenges, and solutions, and a straight read-through will reward the interested reader.

The archival literature is replete with works on collecting projects targeting specific communities.⁴ Common elements of these projects include forming advisory boards, carefully appraising the extent and value of available documentation, and selecting and placing materials in a repository staffed by trained archivists. Documentation projects built in this way place demands on the calendars of archivists and the capacity of repositories, and have been criticized for being time-intensive and occasionally lacking focus.⁵ Recent documentation projects have met with success by blending aspects of documentation strategy with other community engagement strategies, effectively partnering with community members and empowering them to help document themselves.⁶

On that note, Pariticipatory Heritage illustrates many collaborative responses to documentary abundance, and not all of them include top-down planning by trained archivists. Archivists may play many other roles with respect to participatory heritage projects, especially where already-motivated participants exist in a community. The case studies in Participatory Heritage show archivists involved primarily in outreach and instruction, rather than in the tripartite archival mission of collect, preserve, share. In these essays, archivists craft collection development policies (chapter 1), guide communities of practice (chapter 5), and recognize systemic biases on behalf of community organizations (chapter 7).

The essays presented here raise interesting questions about how archivists self-define and draw boundaries around the profession. The editors' introduction presents the idea of a “divide” between trained professionals in the heritage sector and participants without formal training. Chapter 5's discussion of the community of practice at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Australia expands on the distinctions among professional archivists, amateur enthusiasts, and the growing number of “professional amateurs” on staff at volunteer repositories. Emphasis is placed on on-the-job training as a delimiter between pros and amateurs, but one could contend that experiential learning is critical to the work of trained archivists as well. If one asked attendees of a professional archives conference how many knew everything before their first job in the field, surely nary a hand would raise. And, indeed, to an outsider, the difference between the work of the trained archivist volunteering her time and the “professional amateur” volunteers trained by her would be trivial. If all staff have learned on the job, who is the “real” archivist and who is not?

The question of “Who Is the Expert in Participatory Culture?,” implicit in many of the discussions throughout the book, is explicitly called out in the title and discussion of chapter 9. Borrowing a concept from the computer programming world, authors Lýsa Westberg Gabriel and Thessa Jensen evaluate local history projects as either cathedrals or bazaars.⁷ In the cathedral, knowledge is finalized by a small group and distributed in a controlled fashion. In the bazaar, ideas intermingle, influence, and transform each other. Who is the expert, then: the clergy of the cathedral, or the merchant of the bazaar? The short answer is that the experts in the cathedral should welcome expertise from the bazaar and vice versa. Volunteer projects like chapter 15's postcard identification crowdsourcing demonstrate the potential for allowing “street smarts” to be transmitted in the cathedral.

Unfortunately, ten pages is not always enough space to explore the big questions, implicit and explicit. The brevity of each chapter is a double-edged blade, carrying the main advantage and disadvantage of a lightning-round presentation: by providing access to a healthy cross-section of case studies, no one chapter has an opportunity to go into great depth. However, as many of these projects are still active, interested readers have ample opportunity to follow up on their own.

This volume will be of interest and benefit to any archivist who works with or expects to work with community groups to collect and help preserve their histories. There is much here to chew on regarding the potential roles of professional archivists in relation to community heritage groups, whether as collector, adviser, or participant. In a time when many of us are seeing shrinking shelf space and facilities budgets, it's worth considering what services our repositories can offer other than just being, well, repositories.

Walidah Imarisha's keynote address at the 2017 SAA Annual Meeting “Liberated Archive” forum reminds us how easy it is for archives to seem distant from the public, to be “separate from real life.” Imarisha's questions of “who holds knowledge and who controls it” are valid concerns in the field and in the world at large.⁸ Volumes like Participatory Heritage, while not necessarily comprehensive or prescriptive, can provide a way forward for archivists seeking new answers.