Prototyping collaborative (co-)archiving practices: From archival appraisal to co-archival facilitation

Abstract

This paper presents a series of prototyped collaborative (co-)archiving practices developed within the interdisciplinary research project Living Archives. The aim is to explore co-archiving practices for involving underrepresented voices in contributing to our archives, and to create conditions for accessing intangible heritage resources beyond traditional methods. The methodological approach is design research, and participatory design. Six co-archiving practices are presented, designed to invite the user groups to collect, store and share their memories and cultural heritages. We argue that the co-archiving practices prototyped assume an inclusive and a democratic approach. They allow for the involvement of many senses when accessing and generating archive material in an open, but still highly structured way. Applying such co-archiving approach could potentially result in more representative archives, and support archivists interested in going from a focus on archival appraisal to co-archival facilitation.