UCL Mellon Programme - Dr Andrew Flinn, School of Library Archive and information Studies, UCL

Dr Andrew Flinn, School of Library Archive and information Studies, UCL. More ...

In the past fifty years, British society and the histories which seek to understand that society have changed rapidly. The gradual transformation of a diverse yet still predominantly mono-cultural society into a truly multicultural and multi-ethnic one has been mirrored by developments in both academic and popular histories which seek to tell the stories not only of the political and economic elites but representative of all of society, including women, workers, immigrants and ethnic and/or religious minorities. Whether known as new social history, or history from below or identity history, the impact of these developments has had a profound effect on the source for these histories, archives and on the archive profession. In order to tell these histories, to rescue those actors from the condescension of posterity or to uncover those hidden from history, historians have had to re-examine existing collections to try to uncover the ‘traces’ of the whole of society but they have also sought to supplement these archives with new collections such as personal papers, oral history projects, and the papers of community or campaigning organisations. Interaction with archives and other heritage productions, is claimed to play an important role in terms of the production of individual and community identity this contested process is seen both as an essential site of resistance of the dispossessed and the marginal against mainstream, hegemonic culture (from the bottom up) and also as a top-down process through which government cultural and social policy seeks to influence the creation of a more cohesive society via the engagement of individuals and communities with archives and heritage leading to the assertion of a strong and confident assertion of an identity which acknowledges both diversity and commonality. Drawing upon a literature and examples of community archives and community histories from this country and elsewhere (notably South Africa, the United States, Australia and New Zealand) this paper will examine the development of ‘community’ archives including the emergence of virtual communities and virtual archives, and explore the very contested role they might play in terms of identity formation, the telling and re-telling of histories, and the potential for transforming the core definitions and basic tenets of professional practice in terms of archives, preservation, accessibility and custodianship.