2023 Annual Update
March 17, 2023
Shift Collective continues to help organizations better engage, collaborate with, and reflect their local communities. Our team continues to grow as we’ve completed inspiring work with a wide range of partners in 2022, and look to take on new challenges and opportunities in the year ahead. Please see our recap below of what we’ve been up to and what’s on the horizon.
As always, we’re excited to hear from you and find ways to partner to create a more just and equitable world!
What’s Ahead:
In 2023, Shift Collective will begin a three year collaborative research and development project supported by a $2m award from the Filecoin Foundation for the Distributed Web. Modeling Sustainable Futures: Exploring Decentralized Digital Storage for Community-Based Archives will spend the first year conducting research on the ethical, cultural, and technical needs of small cultural memory organizations who steward the most important historical collections for diverse communities around the world. The project will focus on exploring affordable and sustainable digital storage and how a decentralized storage network might offer a viable solution for the tens of thousands of these organizations.
Beginning in 2023 Shift Collective will support the Archiving the Black Web (ATBW) project on a three and half year $2.5 Million investment from the Mellon Foundation to develop WARC School, a web archiving training program for archivists and memory workers at Black collecting organizations, a research project that will attempt to map and define the Black web, and create several opportunities to increase web archiving collections documenting the Black experience. This phase of ATBW is driven by an urgent call to action to establish a more equitable and accessible web archiving practice to effectively document the Black experience online. The partners on the project are the College of Wooster (Lead), Shift Collective, Spelman College Archives, the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, the Center for Communication, Media Innovation, and Social Change at Northeastern University, and the Southern California Library.
In November of 2023, we’ll reconvene Architecting Sustainable Futures at Five (ASF@5), a Celebration, Assessment, and Agenda Setting Convening for Community-Based Archives, thanks to generous support from the Mellon Foundation. Five years ago, we convened 40 community-based archives professionals and funders to look at how these organizations could work together for long-term financial sustainability. The findings helped set the stage for increased collaboration and peer networks, important changes in funding transparency, and new and streamlined funding opportunities direct to smaller cultural memory organizations doing critical work in their communities. This year, we’ll take the time to look at what’s been achieved and look at how we can work together to further this work in the next 5-10 years.
We anticipate launching a new and improved version of Historypin.org in 2023. One of our core free digital tools, Historypin strengthens community through local history and encourages diverse digital storytelling from communities around the world. Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities, we’ve been able to deeply explore user needs and take on the massive project of finding a new platform for a decade-old digital humanities project in use by over four thousand cultural memory organizations around the world.
In 2023 we are supporting Project STAND to host five web archiving workshops for student organizers and activists who are interested in building web archives that can later be used for research, reflection, or activation activities, among other uses. The participating organizations for the workshops are the University of Kentucky, the Ohio State University, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, and the Atlanta University Center. There is a growing list of tools to archive digital content from the web and social media and these tools are becoming more accessible everyday, allowing many people, including students, to utilize these tools for documentation purposes.
We continue our strategic consulting work this year with a number of amazing local and national community memory projects, including the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, and the National Indigenous Knowledge & Language Alliance / Alliance nationale des connaissances et des langues autochtones.
A Wrap in 2022:
Reimagine Descriptive Workflows. We worked with OCLC in 2021 to bring together a (virtual) international convening to, as we said, “prepare the ground for an international movement to radically reimagine descriptive workflows that promote equitable and inclusive practices and representation in central information systems.” Our report was made publicly available in April 2022, along with OCLC’s contextualization and findings for the library and information field.
National Finding Aid Network. We joined the California Digital Library, Chain Bridge Group, OCLC, and the University of Virginia Library (UVA) on this national IMLS-funded project to increase sharing and discovery of archival materials. Our work focused on how this work can meet the needs of community-based archives, and our final report is available here.
Audience Research and Analysis for a National Museum Project. Over the course of a year, we worked with colleagues in the museum field to apply a ground-breaking and diversified research approach that leveraged the analysis of large-scale media consumption, ethnographic research, and Community-Centered Design to inform permanent exhibit space. Our team was augmented by the expertise of Michelle Magalong of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation, Harmony Labs, and Gretchen Barton of Worthy Strategy Group.