Course:ARST575K/LIBR539H/Interference Archive

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Interference Archive
Exterior of the Interference Archive.
Exterior of Interference Archive
Type Community Archives

Activist Archives

Focus Social movement culture
Location 314 7th Street

Brooklyn, New York 11215

United States

Established 2011
Founders Kevin Caplicki
Molly Fair
Dara Greenwald
Josh MacPhee
Website https://interferencearchive.org
Abbreviation IA

Interference Archive (IA) is a community archives located in Brooklyn, New York. The archive is run entirely by volunteers and focuses on collecting ephemera, posters, flyers, and other materials from social movements.

Background

IA began in 2011 by founders Kevin Caplicki, Molly Fair, Dara Greenwald, and Josh MacPhee. Since 2011, the archive has had to move their physical holdings once to a different location in Brooklyn. In addition to the collections that they house in their Brooklyn space, IA also holds events for the public, gives tours to school groups, releases a bi-monthly podcast, puts on art exhibits, and publishes books that detail their exhibitions.[1]

While IA is generally considered to be a community archives, it does not conform exactly to the traditional definition of community archives. Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepard define a community archives as "collections of material gathered primarily by members of a given community and over whose use community members exercise some level of control."[2] IA does fit into this definition in the sense that their team of volunteers decides how their collections are organized, used, and accessed. However, this often-cited definition is complicated by community archives like IA, where the community served cannot be narrowed down to a racialized group or a specific marginalized group. Instead, IA serves a general audience of those who have participated in or are interested in social movements. This audience may include people from marginalized groups, but does not narrow in on just one.

Organizational Structure

While IA collaborates with museums and galleries across the United States,[3] it does not have any formal partnerships with more traditional archival repositories.

Volunteers

IA volunteers are organized into working groups with a specific focus such as Education, Born Digital, or Exhibitions.[4] Though there are no educational requirements for volunteers, some of their volunteers do have formal archival training, whether from experience working at other archives or from graduate programs.[5]

Funding

On their blog, IA volunteers are transparent about the source of their funding. In a post that detailed their funding for the 2018 calendar year, they revealed that most of the funding for the archive, which totaled approximately $86,000, comes from individual donations, class visits, renting out a co-working space, and grants. On the opposite end, their expenses totaled around $90,000, the majority of which was spent on rent, utilities, insurance, office supplies, and programming costs.[6]

Collection

Initially grown out of Greenwald and MacPhee's personal collections of social movement material,[1] IA's collection includes material embodying “the history and cultural production of social movements.”[7] Functioning as a transmovement space for “social movement culture,” IA has material created by and for numerous politically- and geographically- diverse movements.[8]

"Interference Archive, Brooklyn NY" by filarwilliams is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Types of Material

Reflecting discussion in community archives literature, the types of material at IA differ from those typically found in mainstream archives; IA’s collection is more ephemeral and surpasses conventional distinctions between museum objects, gallery works, and library and archives material.[9][10] According to IA’s collection policy, they collect and preserve “everything from posters and prints, buttons, t-shirts, periodicals, pamphlets, zines, books, moving images, audio recordings, and other ephemera.”[7] By favouring ephemera and other mass-produced material over one-of-a-kind material,[7] IA gives less weight to traditional archival ideas of uniqueness, originality, and authenticity; rather more significance is given to ideas, information, and history within the material, its creation for widespread distribution, use, and spread of information, as well as potential visitor interactions with it.[11][12]

Since their founding, IA’s collection has grown significantly due to material being regularly donated by activists and artists across the world.[7] As of 2019, IA's collection contains over 10,000 items.[13] Amongst these are “over 300 political protest buttons from Eleanor Bader” and a myriad of posters, including “hundreds of posters from African and Latin American movements and solidarity organizations from Alexis De Veaux.”[1] Also included are more mysteriously donated material like a peculiar box containing zip tie cuffs and barricade fence clippings from the Occupy movement.[14]

IA does not accept donations requiring any form of access restrictions or that cannot be handled by the public due to poor condition or privacy concerns.[7] According to IA users and organizers, Alycia Sellie, Jesse Goldstein, Molly Fair, and Jennifer Hoyer, as an activist archive, IA does not accept material like protest photographs, containing possibly incriminating information that could be used against those IA aims to support. For this same reason, donor and user information is also not recorded. The recurring issue of archival privilege being unrecognized in courts and legislation, as demonstrated with the Boston College Belfast Project case, supports IA’s cautionary collecting.[15][16]

Access and Organization

Interference Archive's open stacks at their original Brooklyn location, c. 2015.

Differing from the closed-stacks approach of mainstream archives, IA takes an open-stacks and free access approach aligning with community archives ideas of access. Visitors are encouraged to explore and interact with the archive alongside other visitors by taking material off walls and looking through boxes, shelves, and drawers within the stacks.[17][18]

For IA, use and access is preservation. Their collection policy states that public access to material preserves “the collective history and memory of those struggling for social change.”[7] Akin to findings of Marika Cifor, Michelle Caswell, Alda Allina Migoni, and Noah Geraci’s research on community archives, IA functions on the belief that open access to their holdings is important for activists to not only connect to their histories, but also in activating the ideas within the material and inspiring the continuation and start of movements.[19][20] As such, no appointment is required to access IA’s holdings; anyone can walk in and start exploring during IA’s regular hours: Thursday from 1:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. and Friday to Sunday from 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m..[21]

Supporting their open-stacks approach, IA’s material is organized not by provenance but rather in an attempt to support use. Material is first organized by format, and then by subject. For example, all posters on South American guerrilla movements are in a folder with that subject heading. Formats, such as newspapers, encompassing numerous subjects are physically organized alphabetically by title. For these alphabetically organized formats, more user-friendly and thorough subject work is being done in the online catalogue.[12]

Embracing the community archives notions of community control and participation,[22] IA’s holdings are catalogued by community volunteers.[13] Their cataloguing working group includes volunteers who are archivists, librarians, taxonomists, and technologists.[23] The working group hosts “cataloging parties” inviting guests, regardless of experience, to bring their laptops to learn cataloguing skills and help catalogue material.[24]

IA uses the open-source cataloguing software CollectiveAccess for their online catalogue.[23] However, as of February 2021, the catalogue’s publicly accessible front-end is down and has been for some time.[12]

Barely any of IA’s collection has been digitized, but informal scans and reference photographs taken and shared by visitors have been included in their online catalogue.[12] To make their material even more publicly accessible to and utilized by activists, IA aims for its catalogue records to be in the public domain, or close to it, through a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.[25]

Programming

Art and Feminism 2016 Wikipedia Edit-a-thon Event at Interference Archive

IA offers a variety of programming events both on-site and, because of the pandemic, virtually. At their location in Brooklyn, IA hosts art exhibitions, Wikipedia editing marathons, preservation workshops, film screenings, reading groups, book launch events, and more. Some of these events are conceptualized and run directly by the IA volunteers, and some events come about through proposals submitted to IA by community members. IA's policy dictates that any event held in the archive's space is free and open to the community, though donations are accepted.[26] Though the majority of IA's programming is in English, some of their events are bilingual.

The goal of IA's programming is to provide a space for "critical and creative engagement with the histories of social movements," with special consideration for the members of the community that are represented in the materials that IA collects.[27]

IA emphasizes education in their events, and has hosted students of all ages who come to learn about various social movements. While sometimes these class visits involve formal tours or lectures, there is often time for the students to explore the IA through their open stacks organization system.[28]

Response to COVID-19

On March 11, 2020, IA announced in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic that “in solidarity with [their] community and those most vulnerable,” they have temporarily closed their doors and postponed events; as of February 2021, IA remains physically closed.[21] Some previously in-person events, such as class visits, have become virtual.[29]

Challenges and Efforts

As a small volunteer-run space relying on in-person access and promoting physical engagement with material, IA’s prolonged closure has raised challenging questions around sustainability and access. In an October 2020 interview, IA's Volunteer Coordinator, Sophie Glidden-Lyon, said “two main focuses at Interference right now” are “how to pay the rent . . . and how to make sure we are still maintaing and sustaining our volunteer base.”[12]

During the pandemic, IA is making efforts to address access questions. Efforts include working to fix the front-end of their online catalogue, minimizing their backlog of unprocessed material, scanning material for some researchers, and working on creating more thorough catalogue records. Notably, IA has also developed an impromptu working group to proactively collect digital ephemera, particularly that generated by the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality protests. The working group has been exploring questions surrounding the ethics of digital collection of such material, including how to ensure proper permissions are obtained from creators.[12]

Conclusion

IA is a completely volunteer-run archives collecting ephemera, posters, flyers, and other material created by and for social movements of various politics and geographies. IA is a community archives—and an activist archives—in many regards, from its autonomous and participatory nature to its broad and ephemeral collection and emphasis on access. Rather than a serving particular ethnic or marginalized group, IA serves a diverse general audience who is interested in or have participated (or will participate) in social movements.

In addition to collecting, IA preserves this material through access. For IA, use is preservation; preservation of not the physical record, but the information and ideas within it. With its open-stacks approach, user-oriented organization, and programming, IA aims to educate visitors about social movement histories and perhaps, even inspire the continuation and start of movements. While IA promotes physical engagement with its collection and fellow visitors, more recently and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, IA is making efforts toward providing virtual access and programming.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Our History". Interference Archive. Retrieved February 1 2021. Check date values in: |access-date= (help)
  2. ↑ Flinn, Andrew; Stevens, Mary; Sheperd, Elizabeth (October 2009). "Whose memories, whose archives? Independent community archives, autonomy and the mainstream". Archival Science. 9: 71–86. doi:10.1007/s10502-009-9105-2.
  3. ↑ Barry, Louise (February 1, 2018). "Take Back the Fight in Santa Cruz". Interference Archive.
  4. ↑ "Volunteer". Interference Archive. Retrieved February 6, 2021.
  5. ↑ Gordon, Bonnie; Hanna, Lani; Hoyer, Jen; Ordaz, Vero (Summer 2016). "Archives, Education, and Access: Learning at Interference Archive". Radical Teacher: A Socialist, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Journal on the Theory and Practice of Teaching. 105: 55.
  6. ↑ "2018 at Interference Archive: the perspective from our bank account". Interference Archive Blog. Retrieved February 1 2021. Check date values in: |access-date= (help)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 "Donate Materials to Our Collection". Interference Archive. Retrieved February 1, 2021.
  8. ↑ Sellie, Alycia; Goldstein, Jesse; Fair, Molly; Hoyer, Jennifer (2015). "Interference Archive: A Free Space for Social Movement Culture". Archival Science. 9 (4): 460, 463. doi:10.1007/s10502-015-9245-5.
  9. ↑ Flinn, Andrew (2011). "The Impact of Independent and Community Archives on Professional Archival Thinking and Practice". In Hill, Jennie (ed.). The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping. London: Facet Publishing. pp. 147, 149.
  10. ↑ Flinn, Andrew; Stevens, Mary; Shepherd, Elizabeth (October 2009). "Whose memories, whose archives? Independent community archives, autonomy and the mainstream". Archival Science. 9: 74. doi:10.1007/s10502-009-9105-2.
  11. ↑ Flinn, Andrew (2011). "The Impact of Independent and Community Archives on Professional Archival Thinking and Practice". In Hill, Jennie (ed.). The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping. London: Facet Publishing. p. 149.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 Andresini, Emily; McCarther, Amye (October 29, 2020). "Archives as Community-Building Spaces: An Interview with Sophie Glidden-Lyon". Medium.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Cornell, Andrew (2019). "Archival Parties and Parties to Archive: Creating and Recovering Anarchist Resistance Culture at the Interference Archive". American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism. 29 (1): 22.
  14. ↑ Brooks, Emily (June 20, 2019). "Archiving For Access And Activism: An Interview With Interference Archive". The Gotham Center for New York City History.
  15. ↑ Sellie, Alycia; Goldstein, Jesse; Fair, Molly; Hoyer, Jennifer (2015). "Interference Archive: A Free Space for Social Movement Culture". Archival Science. 15 (4): 460–461. doi:10.1007/s10502-015-9245-5.
  16. ↑ George, Christine Anne (Spring/Summer 2013). "Archives Beyond the Pale: Negotiating Legal and Ethical Entanglements after the Belfast Project". American Archivist. 76: 58–60. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  17. ↑ Sellie, Alycia; Goldstein, Jesse; Fair, Molly; Hoyer, Jennifer (2015). "Interference Archive: A Free Space for Social Movement Culture". Archival Science. 15 (4): 455, 461. doi:10.1007/s10502-015-9245-5.
  18. ↑ "Our Mission". Interference Archive. Retrieved February 1, 2021.
  19. ↑ Cifor, Marika; Caswell, Michelle; Migoni, Alda Allina; Geraci, Noah (May 2018). "What We Do Crosses Over to Activism': The Politics and Practice of Community Archives". The Public Historian. 40 (2): 93. doi:10.1525/tph.2018.40.2.69.
  20. ↑ "How New York's Interference Archive Keeps Activist Design History Alive". AIGA Eye on Design. February 16, 2018.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 "Visit". Interference Archive. Retrieved February 1, 2021.
  22. ↑ Flinn, Andrew; Stevens, Mary; Shepherd, Elizabeth (October 2009). "Whose memories, whose archives? Independent community archives, autonomy and the mainstream". Archival Science. 9: 73. doi:10.1007/s10502-009-9105-2.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Sellie, Alycia; Goldstein, Jesse; Fair, Molly; Hoyer, Jennifer (2015). "Interference Archive: A Free Space for Social Movement Culture". Archival Science. 15 (4): 468. doi:10.1007/s10502-015-9245-5.
  24. ↑ "Cataloging Party!". Interference Archive. Retrieved February 1, 2021.
  25. ↑ Sellie, Alycia; Goldstein, Jesse; Fair, Molly; Hoyer, Jennifer (2015). "Interference Archive: A Free Space for Social Movement Culture". Archival Science. 15 (4): 469. doi:10.1007/s10502-015-9245-5.
  26. ↑ "Events Policy". Interference Archive. Retrieved February 6, 2021.
  27. ↑ Gordon, Bonnie; Hanna, Lani; Hoyer, Jen; Ordaz, Vero (Summer 2016). "Archives, Education, and Access: Learning at Interference Archive". Radical Teacher: A Socialist, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Journal on the Theory and Practice of Teaching. 105: 57.
  28. ↑ Gordon, Bonnie; Hanna, Lani; Hoyer, Jen; Ordaz, Vero (Summer 2016). "Archives, Education, and Access: Learning at the Interference Archive". Radical Teacher: A Socialist, Feminist, and Anti-Racist Journal on the Theory and Practice of Teaching. 105: 59.
  29. ↑ "Events". Interference Archive. Retrieved February 1, 2021.
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