Reel Asian Digital
Community Archive
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The Reel Asian Community Archive is informed by community and grassroot archive principles.
Reel Asian community archive strives to create a resource that illustrates the community that makes up Reel Asian film festival as an interconnected web of artists, arts workers, activists, audience members and volunteers.
After 30 years, we ask: what makes a festival; what makes a community? What keeps the festival alive? What are our histories? It’s playful, experimental and most importantly, built in conversation with the community.
We are most closely aligned with a post-custodial community archive, which practices a decentralization of material/physical holdings, and instead, uses digital technology to collaborate and activate these materials toward education on community history.
Our goals are to
Who do we want to use the archive?
Anyone who is curious or interested in browsing publicly available materials are welcome to browse the archive. We encourage educators, researchers, artists and filmmakers, industry professionals and arts workers and festival staff especially to draw upon the archive as a resource.
Sources consulted:
Structure and Values
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A community archive can be loosely defined as:
“Collections of material gathered primarily by members of a given community and over whose community members exercise some level of control. The defining characteristic of community archives is the active participation of a community in documenting and making accessible their history on their own terms.”
Key characteristics of a community archive:
- Participatory
- Shared stewardship
- Reflects a multiplicity of viewpoints and record formats
- Explicitly activist in orientation (nonneutral)
- Concerned with reflexivity
- Values the emotional impact of collecting and use
- Values people and relationships over material objects
Taken from Urgent Archives, Michelle Caswell
The Reel Asian Community Archive is informed by community and grassroot archive principles.
Reel Asian community archive strives to create a resource that illustrates the community that makes up Reel Asian film festival as an interconnected web of artists, arts workers, activists, audience members and volunteers.
After 30 years, we ask: what makes a festival; what makes a community? What keeps the festival alive? What are our histories? It’s playful, experimental and most importantly, built in conversation with the community.
We are most closely aligned with a post-custodial community archive, which practices a decentralization of material/physical holdings, and instead, uses digital technology to collaborate and activate these materials toward education on community history.
Our goals are to
- Nurture long-term relationships with community members who will retain ownership of their materials but offer records of them for shared education and use
- Activate a diverse set of perspectives around and on the history of Reel Asian
- Catalogue and archive existing physical and digital materials at risk of destruction/loss in the office and office storage
Who do we want to use the archive?
Anyone who is curious or interested in browsing publicly available materials are welcome to browse the archive. We encourage educators, researchers, artists and filmmakers, industry professionals and arts workers and festival staff especially to draw upon the archive as a resource.
Sources consulted:
- Stefanie Martin, Archivist
- Michelle Caswell, Urgent Archives
- Tacoma Public Library, “Community Archives Toolkit”
- Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH), “Building a Community Digital Archive”
- Council of Nova Scotia Archives, “Writing an access policy”
