From Real to Digital Communities: Building a Software Archive for Trinity Community Arts

The Heritage Lottery funded project, What’s Your Trinity Story? documents the history of the Trinity Centre in Bristol from the 1960s to today. Trinity embodies and reflects the social and cultural changes that have taken place around it. Since its de-consecration in 1976, Trinity has passed through the hands of a number of groups and owners, whilst developing into a major music and community arts venue for the city. One aim of the project is to establish an online archive for Trinity. A digital archive can offer a more accessible means of engaging communities than a traditional physical archive. Moreover, it creates links between different items, eras, ideas and cultures, challenging physical, temporal and cultural divides. By adopting open standards in the development of the archive, it is hoped that we will allow wider inter-operability and re-use of content, as well as allowing replication of the infrastructure by other groups. This paper discusses some of the challenges encountered in building this archive.