By Katherine Calhoun Cutshall and Zoe Rhine
This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 3 Winter 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue.
The staff of the North Carolina Room at Pack Memorial Library, located in downtown Asheville, NC, is always on the lookout for new ways to engage the public in our work. Until 2009, when the collection first moved into a space of its own, (separate from adult reference) there had not been much in the way of these efforts. Searching for inspiration, staff encountered Archives Alive: Expanding Engagement with Public Library Archives and Special Collections by Diantha Dow Schull. In this volume of case studies, Schull sought out how both public and university libraries (as well as small museums and historical societies) found creative, low budget solutions for engaging in new projects and programs that worked to connect collections with communities.
The biggest take-away from Schull’s work for North Carolina Room staff was the concept of community-driven archives projects. Community-driven or community-based archives being collections created by and for members of a specific community (whether defined by geography, race, culture or class). Community-driven projects aim to increase engagement, because community members will likely want to take an active part in gathering the historical and contemporary heritage of their own community. The collection, under perfect circumstances, comes back fairly turn-key, with staff, in our case, entering the information into our database.
The original plan for the North Carolina Room’s community-based archives project aimed to join our special collections “branch,” located within Pack Memorial Library (the central, downtown Asheville branch), with the eleven outlying libraries in the system acting as outreach arms. According to plan, each community library would become the center of all activity for a geographically-defined, community-based archives project. This plan helped increase access and visibility of the North Carolina Collection for patrons across the county, but also outlying branch staff, who are not all as familiar as they could be with the North Carolina Room, our resources, and collections goals.
Over time, the North Carolina Room has engaged with the concept of community-driven archives in two distinctly different ways, and, so far, completed projects with three different communities, two defined by geography and one defined by race. Before beginning this type of outreach, our archive held scarcely little about the rural communities surrounding Asheville, nor did it fully represent the history of women, people of color, or working-class families. Our goal was that by partnering with branch libraries and community members to seek out different materials, our collections would become more diverse. Once we began community-driven projects, the diversity of our collections increased quite naturally. For the first time, staff were not relying on in-the-know donors, rather, they were seeking out materials from people who may not even know that the North Carolina Room exists.
The North Carolina Room’s first community-driven archives project was titled simply, the “North Asheville History Project.” To begin, North Carolina Room staff mounted an exhibit of material pertaining to North Asheville community of items already in our collection at the North Asheville Branch Library as a means to garner interest. Two signup sheets were made available at the circulation desk, one for those interested in becoming volunteer interviewers, and another for those interested in being interviewed. After some time, community members were invited to an informational meeting and oral history training. Interviewers were provided with recording equipment, questionnaires, and oral history donation forms via a backpack that could be checked out at the branch. The library branch made their community room available for interviews, unless people preferred to be interviewed in their home. In addition to individual interviews, community members were invited to participate in an “Ask Your Elders” roundtable discussion. Throughout the interviewing process, there were two scanning days held at the branch allowing residents a chance to loan a digital copy of their photos to the North Carolina Collection. A final year-end program that included several project participants was given at the Lord Auditorium at Pack Memorial Library because of its larger capacity.
After evaluating the victories and pitfalls of the North Asheville pilot project, staff were able to create a standard protocol for continuing community-based archiving with other communities and library branches. This protocol is based largely on UNC Chapel Hill’s Southern Oral History Project techniques, procedures, and forms. The North Carolina Room has now completed two projects with these procedures: 1) the North Asheville project, and 2) the very successful Fairview project which garnered more than 45 individual interviews (and continues to grow).
The North Carolina Room’s current Community History project breaks from the geography-based community mold, and thus forced staff to modify our protocol to best achieve our goals. This year, recognizing the tremendous absence of African American representation in our collections, staff decided to reach out to Buncombe County’s African American community with the “Black Asheville History Project.” The major difference in this project is there is no specific branch to partner with for outreach and interview space. This led us to a partnership with Buncombe County’s Community Engagement Office, a team working directly with historically marginalized communities to ensure equitable access to county services. Given the African American community’s historically damaged relationship with the library system, in particular the F.A. Sondley Reference Library (the predecessor to the North Carolina Room), we made special efforts to do long-term outreach and be conscious of community concerns about exploitative practices. This also led to a change in project format.
In November 2019 North Carolina Room staff and volunteers hosted our inaugural series of “History Harvests” based on the protocol from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. This new format led us to condensing what would have been a process over several weeks into just a couple of afternoons. Working with the Community Engagement Team, we invited hundreds of community members for an afternoon that included a community round table discussion and plenty of time to scan photos. Digital copies and originals were returned to the owners on the spot.
Each of these formats for community-driven archives projects has their pros and cons, and North Carolina Room staff are still figuring out some of the kinks in our protocols for each. The primary lesson we have learned, is that each community-based project will be different, because each community is different. The most important thing is to be prepared to be flexible and encounter some challenges along the way.
Our recurring challenges:
- Those who are willing to transcribe interviews are far scarcer than those willing to interview. You will probably want to find funds for professional transcription.
- It is probably best to find a community member willing to head up the project. This both allows the community more agency and takes pressure off library staff. These projects can become all-consuming if you let them.
- All people involved in the project should be as informed as they can be about all aspects of the process, including interviewing, scanning photos, permanent donations, deed of gift/loan form language, etc.
- Recruiting hard to reach folks, in particular, those in assisted living facilities or those who may be interested but have moved away from their home community.
Katherine Calhoun Cutshall is Manager of the North Carolina Room at Pack Memorial Library in Asheville, NC. Zoe Rhine recently retired as the Special Collections Librarian at the North Carolina Room at Pack Library.
