The East Side Freedom Library is excited to announce the establishment of a digital repository for community archives! The rise of community-generated archives has unfolded in a time when the experiences, the histories, the past-present-future of marginalized folks are increasingly under a microscope and under attack in socio-political and legislative spheres. The digital repository team at ESFL works with our comrades-in-struggle to identify and digitally preserve at-risk collections that broaden an often homogenized historical landscape. We collaborate with the communities represented in the materials throughout the digitization process to ensure materials are culturally respected, accurately described, and made accessible to all– using emerging radical archival practices. The collections that will become part of the repository offer valuable community knowledge in alignment with the ESFL mission to mobilize community knowledge for solidarity, justice, and equity for all.
We are thrilled to work with Million Artist Movement and Speaking Out Collective to digitize and preserve the first external collections for the repository, including a textile collection of collaboratively made Power Tree Quilts that document Minnesotans’ responses to injustices over the past decade. Other partners and collections will be announced in the coming months.
Here is a sneak peak at the in-house grassroots collection of pinback buttons and pins that friends of the library have been hard at work cataloging and digitizing! This special collection documents labor movements, unions, and a variety of working class liberation struggles from the early 1900s to today. It will be the first collection made public on the Community Digital Repository.
We look forward to hearing the stories and memories folks have to share that are sparked by the treasures you are sure to find in the special collections at ESFL’s Community Digital Repository. Storytelling makes the world go ‘round. Our marginalized and intersectional communities have stories that must be documented and preserved from the inside out. We lean on the truth popularized by the South African disability justice movement:
Nothing about us,
without us,
is for us.
This repository is about us, by us– for workers, for dreamers, for students, for teachers, for researchers, for storytellers, for community… for us.
This project has been financed in part with funds provided by the State of Minnesota from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the Minnesota Historical Society.