Situating Community Archives Along the Continuum of Community-Engaged Archival Praxis: Autonomy, Independence, and the Archival Impulse

Community archives is a widely used concept in both archival scholarship and the archival profession, yet, to date the concept lacks a clear and consistent definition. In attempts to increase inclusivity in the community archives paradigm, scholars have refused to offer a strict definition for the term, resulting in the conflation of community archives and community-based archival practices occurring in institutional repositories. This article reviews the definitions offered in the growing body of community archives literature and offers a reframing of the umbrella concept of community archives through the lens of community engagement. In applying the principles of Arstein’s Ladder, a framework that describes the level of citizen engagement in public planning projects, the authors offer the Continuum of Community-Engaged Archival Praxis that articulates the distinction between community archives and other archival practices that fall on a spectrum of community-based archival projects. Returning to earlier definitions of community archives that center on the autonomy of the community, they ground community archives in the concept of the archival impulse as a means for identifying the impetus of a community-engaged archival project and the directionality of the control over the archives. The continuum and impulse provide a means for disambiguating the myriad concepts that fall under the moniker of “community” and for more clearly defining the relationship between institutional repositories and the communities that they seek to engage.