Archivists have historically measured success by the volume of records brought into a repository, where the institution processed, housed, and owned them. However, this centralized approach often stripped records of their living context.
Post-custodial archiving offers a new path in which records remain with their creators, and archivists act as partners. This model prioritizes community autonomy, ensuring that those who lived the history control its legacy.
Ownership to Empowerment
The historical context of post-custodialism is rooted in a critique of institutional power. Traditional archives often functioned as monuments to the state or elite organizations. By contrast, the post-custodial model recognizes that a community’s records are vital to its identity and agency.
In this context, archivists shift from gatekeepers to facilitators. An ethical commitment to empowering communities to maintain control over their materials is crucial to communities asserting sovereignty over their knowledge. This approach also requires archivists to develop competencies in relationship-building and participatory practices. Rather than prioritizing physical custody, they emphasize context and collaboration, ensuring that records remain meaningful and usable within their originating communities while still contributing to historical understanding and discourse.
Building Capacity, Providing a Toolkit
The success of a post-custodial project depends on a foundation of shared expertise. Archivists provide training to community members in organization, preservation, and description. Rather than imposing standards, archivists provide a toolkit that communities can adapt to their own needs.
Digital tools play a role in decentralized management. Platforms allow communities to manage their records locally while still benefiting from software, and metadata should enable interoperability without imposing constraints. Archivists help communities create records that are searchable and compatible with systems, ensuring their history is saved.
The Hybrid Model for Post-Custodial Partnerships
Many successful post-custodial partnerships utilize a hybrid model. In this setup, the community maintains physical records in a community center. The partner institution provides technical infrastructure, such as digital backups or cloud storage.
This collaboration requires navigating complex legal and copyright considerations. Memoranda of understanding define partnerships that state the community retains all ownership and copyright. The institution may only hold digital surrogates for preservation or access purposes. Trust-building is the most critical infrastructure in this process. Relationships must be nurtured over time, moving at the community’s pace.
A Decentralized World
One of the primary critiques of post-custodialism is the perceived risk to records. Without climate-controlled vaults and 24-hour security, many wonder if the records remain safe. To address this, archivists help communities implement decentralized risk management strategies.
This process involves establishing redundancy by creating multiple digital copies stored in different geographic locations. It also includes disaster planning, where archivists train community members to respond to floods, fires, or hardware failures. Additionally, community-driven appraisal helps identify which records are permanent and which are temporary, ensuring that resources focus on the most vital materials.
Impact on Archival Labor
This shift profoundly influences archival labor. Post-custodial archivists must be diplomats and teachers. They help communities find funding through local grants or philanthropic partnerships to support their projects.
This work is often invisible in professional metrics that count linear feet of processed paper. Therefore, a key area of advocacy within the profession is recognizing post-custodial work in promotion structures. It requires a reimagining of professional identity, recognizing that archivists steward both collections and relationships.
Future Directions
Successful collaborations abound, from oral history projects to activist collections documenting social movements. In these cases, the institution provides scaffolding, and the community provides the soul, including stories and lived experience.
By fostering scalable post-custodial partnerships, archivists create a research landscape as diverse as the people they document. When archivists respect community autonomy while maintaining professional rigor, they ensure that the records are living assets that belong to the people.
0 Comments