Introduction

Abstract

The activity of ‘archiving’ is … always a critical one, always a historically located one, always a contestatory one, since archives are in part constituted within the lines of force of cultural power and authority; always one open to the futurity and contingency – the relative autonomy – of artistic practice; always … an engagement, an interruption in a settled field, which is to enter critically into existing configurations to re-open the closed structures into which they have ossified. (Hall, 2001, 89–92) This dynamic vision of the ‘activity of archiving’ proposed by Stuart Hall a decade ago is being vigorously addressed today by community archives, not least through their challenges to traditional archival theory and practice. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, the practice of community archiving is not only a compelling and diverse international endeavor in its own right, but presages shifts in archival development as society increasingly engages with records and with people whose lives and histories have often seemed to exist beyond and outside the mainstream. From exploratory beginnings in the twentieth century, community archives as discrete and identifiable entities burst upon the archival world, belatedly receiving recognition and interest from the archive and heritage professions in the early decades of the twenty-first century with a forceful momentum that to date shows no signs of abating. Community-based informal archives, frequently staffed by volunteer and non-professional archivists, had long existed in a variety of venues but the concept of community archives was largely unexplored and unfamiliar to archivists. The ad hoc and highly diversified natures of community archives were often not recognised as archival repositories. Their content, often focused on marginalised and undervoiced segments of the population and often not manifest in standard records formats, did not meet the normative standards of archivists generally focused on institutional records and the acquisition of prestigious collections and were dismissed as ephemeral.

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