Digital scholarship and communities do not just intersect in the field of digital preservation–they run parallel. Unfortunately, when large institutions such as universities work with smaller, community-based archives, the relationship is often far from balanced. Conferences, working groups, and other such collaborative events have laid important groundwork for ensuring that researchers from academic institutions form mutually beneficial relationships with community-based archivists, but extractive relationships remain a problem within the field (Caswell et al. 2021). The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) states on its website that it strives to incorporate values of diversity, equity, and inclusion as a backbone of its work, which contributes to a collaborative ethos between aggregation hubs and the communities that participate in aggregation (“Strategic Plan,” n.d.). However, there is very little published research on how this theory is practiced in the field, nor is there much information about why these communities prefer (or don’t prefer) to preserve their materials through the DPLA. Working with the University of California Irvine and the California Digital Library, the Connecticut Digital Archive (University of Connecticut Library) team has embarked on a research project to determine the best ways in which digital preservation services can understand community needs and support them instead of viewing these communities through a deficit lens. We hope our project will encourage conversation amongst other digital scholarship project members so that we can learn about similar issues in other projects, help decolonize existing practices, and grow as a field together.
Presenters: Rachael Nutt (University of Connecticut), Gregory Colati (University of Connecticut), Heather C. Owen (University of Connecticut) & Michael Howser (University of Connecticut)
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