Cultivating Our Garden: Archives, Community, and Documentation

Abstract

Archivists have long shown an interest in documenting communities and in working with underdocumented communities. Planning such efforts should call into play a wide variety of intellectual and philosophical issues: identity, memory, epistemology, and even truth. A recent collaboration of state historic records advisory boards (SHRABs) in North Dakota and Minnesota examined these issues in a study of agriculture and rural life in the Red River Valley. After working with a wide variety of constituencies, the SHRABs began to analyze how to translate what they learned into the everyday routine of archival practices, with particular references to communities, costs, and benefits.