Digital Archives of Community Groups
Digital materials including ephemera, correspondence and campaign materials created as a by-product of small scale or ad-hoc community action groups.
Examples
Archives of smaller and ad-hoc political and campaigning organizations; environmental protests; sports clubs; smaller religious groups; amateur music or drama; fan groups
Hazards
Poor documentation; lack of replication; lack of continuity funding; lack of residual mechanism; dependence on a small number of volunteers, lack of preservation mandate; lack of preservation thinking at the outset; conflation of backup with preservation; conflation of access and preservation; inaccessible to web archiving; dependence on social media providers; distrust of ‘official’ agencies; uncertainty over IPR or the presence of orphaned works
Organisational LimitsMitigations
Residual archive with residual funding able to receive and support collections; active user community; intellectual property managed to enable preservation
Bit List History
Added to list: 2019Last Review
2023 Review
The Jury created this entry in 2019 as a subset of ‘Community Archives and Community-Generated Content’ which was split into two entries to provide greater specificity in recommendations for approaching the preservation of created as a by-product of small scale or ad-hoc community action groups (versus digital materials generated for significant purpose of a community initiative). The 2020 Jury identified a 2020 trend towards greater risk based on community groups such as sports clubs, religious communities, arts and political groups, often relying on volunteer effort, being unable to meet for extended periods in 2020. Moreover, the local community centres, clubs or places of worship on which they depend had closed, in some cases for good. This trend continued for 2021; the 2021 Jury commented that much of the content in community archives has easily preservable content, but resources are not directed towards them, basic digital preservation practices are not well embedded amongst the general population, and selective approaches are needed to get a handle on the situation and to find the resources to do the work.
The 2023 Council agreed with the classification of Critically Endangered. with the overall risks remaining on the same basis as before (‘No change’ to the 2023 trend). However, they also noted an increase in the significance of loss due to the fact that community heritage tends to be part of wider conversations within the international landscape.
2024 Interim Review
The 2024 Council agreed these risks remain on the same basis as before, with no significant trend towards even greater or reduced risk (‘No change’ to trend).
Additional Information
Typically, born-digital material is more at risk as community groups may not know about the risk of loss. Many are unaware of digital preservation terminology. It is the ad-hoc nature of these groups and projects which is of great concern.
There is a significant need to raise awareness and provide a ‘home’ but also to do so with sufficient sensitivity so as to ensure community groups remain in control of their own material.
Communities who live in rural and remote areas may have a lack of access to services such as broadband connectivity, which is a well-reported issue and is often referred to as the ‘digital divide’. Inadequate internet connectivity would diminish the capacity for these communities to access digital preservation solutions, such as cloud storage for digital assets. This is especially prevalent with personal photos and videos on mobile phones as possession of a mobile phone does not necessarily mean the user has adequate internet connectivity to be able to upload videos to web-based platforms.
AI could potentially be used to assist with easy access to simple, succinct explanations and principles of digital preservation and archiving solutions which would give these communities a wider understanding of the work being done and empower them to be able to do minimum digital preservation themselves.
Case Studies & Examples
- A new preservation toolkit resource, ‘Digital Preservation for Community Archives’, was released for World Digital Preservation Day on 7 November 2024. The preservation toolkit has been created alongside the University of Glasgow as part of the Our Heritage, Our Stories (OHOS) project, and has been developed in collaboration with a range of community archives. It will include a range of practical guidance, support, and advice to those working with digital records in the community context. See Community Archives Digital Preservation Toolkit, Digital Preservation Coalition (2024), Digital Preservation Coalition.
- In the 2023 NDSA Web Archiving Survey Report, one of the major takeaways noted that since the first Web Archiving Survey in 2011, the landscape of web archiving has dramatically changed, and the 2022 survey results show an increase in web archiving practices by grassroots organizations, volunteer groups, and non-academic communities who seek to document their lived experiences. See Web Archiving Survey Results: An NDSA Report, National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) (2019), [accessed at 2024-09-11].
- Digital inequality is recognized as one of the targets in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, the objective of which is to “enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and governments to work together to overcome the inequality experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and achieve life outcomes equal to all Australians.”. Target 17 states that “By 2026, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have equal levels of digital inclusion”. See Closing the Gap Targets and Outcomes, Closing the Gap [accessed at 2023-10-24].
- The “digital divide” in Australia has an impact on digital preservation of content generated by communities living in remote areas. See Australia's digital divide means 2.8 million people remain 'highly excluded' from internet access, Parke, E. (2022), ABC [accessed at 2023-10-24].
- The “digital divide” in Australia has an impact on digital preservation of content generated by communities living in remote areas. See ‘Digital divide’: report finds some Australian rural mobile data speeds 90% slower than urban, Al Khawaldeh, K. (2022), The Guardian [accessed at 2023-10-24].
- Byte-sized Bit List: Using the Bit List to garner action in support of Community Archives, Wilson, A. (2023), Digital Preservation Coalition [accessed at 2023-10-24].