Rethinking Archival Experience: Tracing Content Trends and Examining the Role of Community in a User-Generated Digital Music Archive

Abstract

As digital archives evolve, it is important to ask how they serve their users and to shine a light on their conceptualization and construction. Archives such as the Manchester Digital Music Archive (MDMArchive), a digital community music archive based in England, take community experience and memory as their starting point and guiding focus. This Digital Library Brown Bag, drawing on a case study of the MDMArchive, examines how user-generated digital archives contribute to the development of more representative and democratized repositories of memory through the use of participatory collecting methods and equitable curatorial practices. Based on a dissertation project exploring the motivations behind community archiving and the place of community archives within broader heritage networks, this presentation combines ethnographic research with digital humanities analytical methods to trace trends in archival content over time and outline the overall structure of the online archive. By engaging in these analyses, this multimodal research allows for a larger scale examination of how digital archives are used and speculation about how they can be used to foster and sustain community-based knowledge.