2025 Annual Update
January 29th, 2025
As always, we’re excited to hear from you and find ways to partner to create a more just and equitable world!
How We’re Supporting the Field in 2025:
We’re moving into the final year of a three-year collaborative research and development project supported by a $2 Million award from the Filecoin Foundation for the Distributed Web. Modeling Sustainable Futures: Exploring Decentralized Digital Storage for Community-Based Archives is exploring how the ethical, cultural, and technical needs of small cultural memory organizations can utilize and inform emerging decentralized storage technologies. You can download and reuse (CC-BY SA) our full report, a summary presentation deck, and a 2-page tech brief on decentralized web technologies for community-based archives. In 2025, we’ll be releasing our Year 2 findings about the prototype we developed and lessons learned, and expand to include three community-based archive networks to test the prototype at scale.
Shift Collective continues to support the Archiving the Black Web (ATBW) project on a three-and-a-half-year $2.5 Million investment from the Mellon Foundation to develop WArc School, a web archiving training program for archivists and memory workers at Black collecting organizations; a research initiative that will attempt to map and define the Black web; and create several opportunities to increase web archiving collections documenting the Black experience. Archiving The Black Web is driven by an urgent call to action to establish a more equitable and accessible web archiving practice to effectively document the Black experience online. The partners on the project are Shift Collective, the College of Wooster, Spelman College Archives, the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, and the Southern California Library. The project is led by Makiba Foster and Dr. Bergis Jules.
ATBW has opened applications for Web Archiving School (WArc School). The project is now recruiting fellows, instructors, and teaching assistants. WArc School is a 1-year program with a comprehensive curriculum that invites participants and instructors to bring the fullness of their experiences and interests into the classroom.
Shift Collective is excited to be working with Exygy, a San Francisco-based technology organization we hired in September 2024, to redevelop Historypin.org, one of our core free digital tools. We have embarked on this multi-phased project to update Historypin.org’s technical infrastructure, refresh its visual design, and create new tools to support the use and growth of this public service humanities platform. Historypin, in use by over four thousand cultural memory organizations, strengthens community through local history and encourages diverse digital storytelling from communities around the world.
Beginning in January 2025, Shift Collective is supporting Project STAND by serving as a fiscal sponsor to their project on a three-year $1.5 Million investment from The Mellon Foundation. Project STAND is a national consortium of archivists, librarians, activists, and educators committed to the preservation and use of archival materials documenting social justice movements. This is the debut of Shift Collective’s fiscal sponsor program and we are honored to work with Project STAND and its founder, Lae’l Hughes-Watkins. Please see the Project STAND press release for more information on the partnership.
How We’re Supporting Others in 2025:
In 2024, Shift Collective continued its work on a two-year research project with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to retrospectively assess CLIR’s Recordings at Risk program. Recordings at Risk is a national regranting program funded by the Mellon Foundation and administered by CLIR to help preserve “rare and unique audio, audiovisual, and other time-based media of high scholarly value through digital reformatting,” according to CLIR. Over the past year, Shift Collective has designed and administered a comprehensive survey to learn more about the experiences of those who have considered applying for, applied for, or received a Recordings at Risk (RaR) grant. We have also conducted interviews with grant recipients and other applicants, the program’s independent review panel, CLIR’s staff, and other stakeholders to evaluate the program’s impact on collecting organizations and the communities they serve. Our research aims to shed light on the persistent challenges faced by stewards of fragile and obsolete audiovisual media and help guide future endeavors by CLIR and others “committed to the safekeeping of rare and unique audiovisual materials.” In 2025, Shift Collective will publish a public-facing report documenting our findings.
Each year, we take on a small number of strategic consulting partnerships like this. Last year, we had the honor of working with a number of amazing local and national community memory projects, including the Manilatown Heritage Foundation and the National Indigenous Knowledge & Language Alliance / Alliance nationale des connaissances et des langues autochtones. Let us know if you’d like to learn more about our strategic planning and consulting services.
2023 - 2024 Wrap Up:
Participants at the 2023 Architecting Sustainable Futures at Five convening.
In November of 2023, we hosted many of our friends in New Orleans for Architecting Sustainable Futures at Five (ASF@5), a Celebration, Assessment, and Agenda Setting Convening for Community-Based Archives. The event was made possible by generous support from The Mellon Foundation. Five years prior, in 2018, we convened 40 community-based archives professionals and funders to look at how these organizations could work together for long-term financial sustainability. The 2018 findings helped set the stage for increased collaboration and peer networks, important changes in funding transparency, and new and streamlined funding opportunities direct to smaller cultural memory organizations doing critical work in their communities, including the launch of Mellon Foundation’s Community-Based Archives grants, which are now being offered for a second round. For ASF@5, we took the time to look at what’s been achieved and how we can all work together to further the sustainability of community-based archives in the next 5-10 years. The resulting ASF@5 Report, published in May 2024, contains a wealth of information and important recommendations for the field. We hope you can give it a read and share it with your networks.
As part of the ASF@5 report, we also released the Community-Based Archives Continuum, which is informed by over a decade of work in the field and in particular, over five years of deep research. The Continuum is a way for us to generalize the broad spectrum of organizations in the field and identify measurable ways they can be supported wherever they may be on the continuum at any given time.
Team News
The Shift Collective: Zakiya, Bergis, Jon, Lynette and Erin (and just joined, below: Camille!)
Bergis Jules completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Riverside in December 2024. His dissertation title is Towards Affirming Blackness in Archive Making: How Black Memory Workers Leverage Their Racial and Cultural Positionality to Inform Collection Development Decisions. He will continue to lead field building projects and consulting engagements for Shift Collective.
Lynette Johnson was honored with the 2024 Founder’s Award from the Louisiana Creole Research Association (LA Creole) for “outstanding contributions to Creole history and culture as historian, writer, storyteller and cultural preservationist.”
Camille Lawrence joined the Shift Collective team in January 2025. She will primarily support the Archiving the Black Web project as a web archivist. Camille brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to supporting the work of ATBW and we’re excited to have her join us as we grow the Collective. You can check out Camille’s bio on our website.
Zakiya Collier will be a 2025 Create Change Artist-in-Residence at The Laundromat Project, where she’ll lead an intergenerational, community-based creative project collaboratively archiving Black history in Brooklyn, NY. In 2024 she published two book chapters, “Are You Family?: Mapping the Genealogy of Black Queer Library Workers,” and “Rehousing Archivists: Attending to a Livable Future for A Black, Queer Disabled Memory Worker.”