Ruth Grossman
University of Toronto
Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking
(Refereed Stream)
Archival institutions and the concerns of Community Informatics occupy a great common territory and yet little familiarity (and even less interaction) exists between the discourses. What do community informatics and archives have to talk about? Why are they ostensibly opposed in theory and practice? How might the roadblocks to a growing potential for joint programming be dematerialized and what is the rationale for attempting it? The archives is presented as a site of negotiation between public memory and contemporary aspiration. The proposition of creating primary records within the archives challenges certain assumptions regarding long-term custodianship by taking up the uncertainties of active community identity-building, by transferring the inherent philosophical debate to the archives proper, and by seeking strategies by which the infrastructure and conceptualization of archives would be equipped to facilitate an emerging model of community informatics.
