Last week at this time, I was happy just to have secured an initial meeting with our client, the Lakeland Community Heritage Project. This week, as we try to jump into the work of the project, it is clear that we need so much more information than we were able to gain in a 90-minute meeting. We haven’t actually been able to get into the Omeka site through which the collection is accessed. We only just got read-only access to the Airtable that MITH has started. We still need to explore and discuss as a group the options for how to create an usable inventory.

During the meeting, I was impressed by the passion and dedication that the member of the working group brough to the project. They really believe in the importance of preserving community by creating and preserving community archives. Yet, this project is still an avocation for everyone involved. From the president of LCHP to the MITH team members to ourselves, everyone has a day job. LCHP, no matter how important in principle, gets lost in more urgent day to day demands. So scheduling meetings is like pulling teeth. Email and online chatting through Slack are better but still dependent on catching people at the right moment. I am noting this not (just) to vent, but to illuminate one of the key challenges of community archives. Largely supported by volunteer labor, the community archives often exist only through the gift of time and labor that can only be given intermittently and often inconsistently. And we should be grateful! Most of people involved in LCHP (and I imagine most other public-supported community archives) are already working day jobs and second shifts beyond what they give back to the community.  Since curation involves provision for the sustainability of repositories and records, we will need to account for this reality in whatever solution we propose. Quick comprehensibility and ease of use are crucial for effective use of volunteer/amateur labor.