The Challenge

Community-based archives hold some of the most valuable materials documenting the lives of marginalized people and they mostly exist independently of other traditional academic or government-run cultural heritage institutions. But while these archives continue to collect and preserve these histories, many of them face difficulties growing their operations, keeping their doors open, and enhancing their programming and collections activities because of a lack of funding opportunities and other ongoing resources common in larger institutions.

Our Approach

Shift Collective is dedicated to supporting these organizations in a variety of ways. In 2023, we began a three year collaborative research and development project supported by Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web.

In the first year, the project will explore the ethical, cultural, and technical needs of small cultural memory organizations who steward the most important historical collections for diverse communities around the world. The project will focus on exploring affordable and sustainable digital storage and how a decentralized storage network might address particular stated needs for the tens of thousands of these organizations. Our goal is to design an early prototype for community-centered, non-extractive, affordable, and accessible long-term storage, using our Historypin platform as the front-end interface.

In the second year, the team will create a prototype centered on 5 community-based archives and their digitial collections, in collaboration with invited institutional partners. In the third year the team will explore the possibility of scaling the project together with 3 digital networks of community-based archives, creating and evaluating a proof-of-concept prototype that leverages the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) internet protocol.

Year 1 Outputs and Reports (free to download and reuse, CC-BY-SA):

Download the outputs from year one of our research, including:

• a 2 page tech-brief to inform community-based archives about the basics of decentralized web technologies and implications for how it provides potential for digital storage and verification of authenticity

• a summary presentation deck of our main research and findings from year 1

• the full report of our findings from the first year of research, including more background on decentralized storage, concerns from community-based archives, risk and benefit analysis for different types of CBAs, and our proposal for harm reduction model for further exploring the technology.

A special thanks to the team of community-based archives practitioners and technologists who joined our research team for this project:

Our Research Faculty (Year 1):

• Paulette Brown-Hinds, PhD - Black Voice News/Voice Media Ventures

• Beth Castle, PhD, Warrior Women Project

• Chris Sherertz, Warrior Women Project

• Samip Mallick, SAADA

• Yusef Omowale, Southern California Library

• Teressa Raiford, Don't Shoot Portland

• Holly A. Smith, Spelman College Archives

• Gabriel Solís, Texas After Violence Project

• Maigen Sullivan, Invisible Histories Project

Our Technical Advisors (Year 1):

• Ed Summers, Stanford University

Our Institutional Partners (Year 2/3):

• To be determined. Learn more if you’re interested.

Funding

Join the Research:

Research Outputs:

Related Research:

1. Historypin Platform

Shift Leads: Lynette/Jon

Activities:

• Determine tech partner

• Strategy, timing & scope of work

• Ensuring there is a pathway to decentralized storage

3. Community-Based Archives Collections

Shift Leads: Erin/Bergis

Activities:

• Identify and work with 5 community-based archives in Year 2, with 3 networks in year 3

• Support them in digitization and planning process

• Support them in creating 10 collections on Historypin

• Document needs, processes, issues

• Walk through decentralized storage MVP and test viability