In 1970, Howard Zinn gave an address to the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and
called upon the archival profession to discard pretensions of neutrality and “take the trouble to
compile a whole new world of documentary material, about the lives, desires, needs, of ordinary
people” (Zinn 1977, 25). This marked a turning point and highlighted the movement to push the
archival profession away from protecting the status quo and towards an endeavor for a more
democratic and pluralized archival record in which the records of ordinary people are as valued
as those of powerful groups and individuals. This dissertation, which is at the data collection and
analysis stage, is largely an exploration of one type of such effort: participatory archive
collection day events. This study examines how ordinary people and their communities connect
to archival records and to archival institutions. The communities represented in these archives
are varied and their members are often referred to as “ordinary people” in the literature on
movements to pluralize archival records.
Through a combination of primary source data analysis and ethnographic field data
collection and analysis, this project will investigate the ties between archival institutions,
communities, records, and memory in participatory archive initiatives. Using Bastian’s (2003)
community of records framework, I aim to examine how communities of ordinary people in
archival institutions use event-based mediated participatory archive projects to create meaning,
memory, and relationships based on personal and community records
