East Carolina University / Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS) Internship & Resource Development Project Grant uri icon

abstract

  • The collective work of FOCAS (Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support) empowers community archives served by nine programs across the U.S. and Canada to continue their essential work documenting, stewarding, and making accessible the history of underrepresented cultures and peoples. Our goal as FOCAS is to promote sustainability in these community archives by ensuring respectful training; centering and honoring relationships and relationality as integral to memory-making, memory-keeping, and long-term archival work; providing outreach and fundraising information and strategies; supporting hands-on archival practices through which students and community members work together as teacher-learners; and ultimately developing a comprehensive resource toolkit - that will help to sustain the community archives in years to come. We want to ensure that community archives hosting LIS students and the LIS students are paid for their labor and commitment to this transformative project. Additionally, we aim to equip students with valuable professional skills, including cultural competency, information literacy, and community-centered work. In addition, this program will help preserve, make accessible, and steward the histories and stories of underrepresented communities in the United States and Canada. Participating students will work with diverse community archives to create finding aids that make collections accessible; digitize collections; create and implement digital asset management systems and digital preservation plans; organize and develop exhibitions; facilitate diverse storytelling methods; and/or develop fundraising, sustainability, and capacity-building activities. ECU: FOCAS will be a foundation upon which the ECU MLS Program can educate and inspire pre-service and early-career librarians and archivists to be positive sustainable contributors of their skills and knowledge to the communities they serve.

date/time interval

  • July 2024 - June 2027