title: COMMUNITY ARCHIVES AT THE DIGITAL REPOSITORY OF IRELAND
creators: Lisa Griffith Kevin Long
abstract: The Community Archive Scheme is a bottom-up method of community engagement that the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) uses to work directly with no or low-income groups with digital material to preserve. The DRI's usual depositors are academic, cultural heritage, or public organisations and libraries with a long history of archiving who select material from their own collections for preservation. Through the Community Archive Scheme, we work in a hands-on way to provide digital preservation to a wider range of groups that fall outside of this sphere. The scheme celebrates its fifth anniversary in 2023 and during this period DRI has worked with nine voluntary groups to help preserve material on a variety of topics including the experience of asylum seekers in Ireland, maternal health, built heritage, LGBT rights and activism in Ireland. The types of material that we are working to preserve through this scheme vary from photographs of artists' works such as quilts, audio-visual material such as community documentaries, and documentaries produced for digital radio and social media. This paper will discuss how the scheme evolved, how these organisations have strengthened DRI as an organisation as well as making our community and collections more equitable and diverse, challenges we have encountered, some of the solutions we have developed, where our successes have come from and some of the future developments we are exploring so that we can continue to work with these groups.
keywords: digital archives community archives digital preservation inclusion membership ireland cultural heritage data