We specialise in community heritage and community archives. So what is a community archive?
The definition of ‘community archive’ is the cause of some debate. Broadly speaking, people think of projects as community archives either because:
- The subject-matter of the collection is a community of people. The classic example is a group of people who live in the same location, but there are ‘communities of interest’ as well, such as people who worked in a certain profession. We’ve created community archive sites for towns and as villages all round the UK and Ireland, as well for organisations such as Gloucester Rugby Club and Waitrose.
- The process of creating the collection has involved the community. Typically, this means that volunteers have played a key role, sometimes alongside professional archivists. This means we have to make our websites and catalogues very easy to use.