Beyond the Vault: Building Communities and Collections through Innovative Outreach

Abstract

As stewards of archives and special collections, we strongly believe in creating welcoming and inclusive spaces within our institutions for scholars, institutional users, students, and the public. Part of this work involves building connections to the communities we serve in order to enhance use of extant holdings, but also to build relationships that will allow our collections to represent previously underserved voices and stories. In this session, four librarians/archivists working with rare and unique materials will discuss outreach efforts launched within the last three years. Our approach, extending from Duff and Haskell’s 2015 American Archivist article forwarding a rhizomatic approach to access, suggests that outreach requires collaboration and continuing dialogue, an expansive and creative view of potential partners, and a willingness to reconsider traditional institutional practices. The forms of outreach and relationships we will discuss are interpersonal, rather than technological. As in the metaphor of the rhizome, we aim to decenter our own authority in engaging with community partners and create reciprocal relationships based on trust and accountability. Projects we will discuss include the following: 1) An archivist at a liberal arts college will speak about his work, as part of a campus-wide community based learning and research initiative, to acquire collections from community partners, deposit student work created through community based learning in the archives, and support students completing archival research for community partners. He is planning a course in Spring 2020 focusing on underrepresented voices at the college, particularly student clubs and organizations. 2) A head of special collections and rare books (SCRB) at a public university will discuss the outcomes of a grant-funded initiative that involved investigating the current state of dance legacy in metro Vancouver, providing dance organizations with archival training and resources, and determining next steps of collaboration with dance organizations to build a city-wide dance legacy strategy. 3) A librarian from a denominational library and archives will talk about workshops and other tools developed to support churches in stewarding their records. No mandate requires churches to deposit materials in the central archives; when such deposits occur, it is often during the emotionally fraught time of a church closure, thus requiring that a solid foundation of collaboration and trust already exist. 4) A graduate assistant in a university special collections will speak about an online exhibit they curated to promote activism holdings to undergraduates and their investigation of Indigenous materials classification systems to help the Library to continue to decolonize its descriptive practices. We hope to offer valuable perspectives for under-resourced or smaller institutions, including liberal arts colleges, small universities, and denominational libraries. Outreach takes many forms, and may result in new areas of collection building, instruction or workshops, and programmatic changes to general descriptive practices. We will discuss the challenges and rewards of these outreach strategies. We will also offer practical suggestions and creative ideas that attendees can adapt and implement at their home institutions to foster sustainable collaborations across their institutions and with the communities they serve and hope to serve.