Participatory Appraisal and Arrangement for Multicultural Archival Collections

Archival theory has a long history of utilizing principles designed to preserve contextual value in records. We believe that traditional practices of appraisal, arrangement, and description can be rearticulated as participatory, community-orient­ ed processes. This can enable context to be represented meaningfully in archives of traditionally marginalized communities. We believe this process can help build cultur­ ally relevant records repositories while enabling marginalized communities to share their experiences with a wider public. By broadening their traditional tools to actively engage marginalized communities in the preservation process, archivists can preserve local knowledge and create representative, empowered archives. Sources of power are derived from the capacity of cultural institutions to classify and define peoples and societies. This is the power to represent: to reproduce structures of belief and experience through which cultural differences are understood. Ivan Karp1 * The authors would like to thank Dr. Anne Gilliland and Joy Novak for helpful comments on early drafts of this article. Ivan Karp, “Introduction: Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture,” in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine (Washington and London, 1992), pp. 1–2. ARCHIVARIA 63 (Spring 2007): 87–101 Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists – All rights reserved 1