Introduction

The ‘Finding Myself in the Archives’ (2017) project undertaken by the Ward Museum in Canada is illustrative of creative approaches to opening up the ‘Archive’ to new forms of scrutiny and new interpretive voices. It does so in a way that allows for collective reorientations of history, culture and witness through innovative curatorial practice. Students who had taken part in the project were asked to research and find the ‘stories’ connoted by 54 objects from the collection of the University of Toronto. They were to relate the objects and associated stories not just to their own lives but also to the lives of the marginalised communities those objects touched.

While the participants were students studying on a museum programme, they were a ‘community’ in their own right, a professional community in the making, one that would shortly form part of a new generation of archival professionals, guardians of knowledge and potential gatekeepers. This and many other recent projects, such as those undertaken as part of the Research Councils UK Connected Communities programme and Digital Transformations theme, point to a sea-change in institutional and community relationships that increasingly foregrounds collaborative approaches (Facer and Enright, 2016). Such approaches increasingly invite the community into the institutional archival space and legitimise the non-institutional archive, recognising the reciprocal value and authority of the community and the vibrant potential of collaborative dialogues that challenge traditions, innovate new practices and share the inherent power of the archive in all its emergent forms (Crooke, 2007; Flinn, 2010; Hacker, 2013).

The archive as community

The archival space is one populated by communities of all sorts: those represented, those who curate and care for its contents, those who excavate and interpret, and those curious about what, if anything, it has to say about their own lives and histories. These roles, often separated and oppositional in the past, are increasingly disrupted and interrogated by a combination of new approaches, materialities, digital technologies and the pressures of the prevailing economic climate. The potential to collect, connect and challenge knowledge, remix materials, share responsibilities and flip boundaries is palpable and ongoing (Smith, 2007).