Personal Archival Practices

Archival stewardship is a useful concept in understanding an archivist’s management of records and collections. Without the practical application of stewardship, archives would be less accessible and intelligible to the public, far less physically protected, and disconnected from the community from which it may stem. This work remains invaluable in the archival field, but it is both inadequate in capturing and frequently leaves out the care, labor, and intellectual contributions of community members who are stewards of their own archives prior to donating them to institutions. By better understanding their archival stewardship work, this paper broadens the archival field’s definition of stewardship to include unique, community-specific contributions, its findings impacting core theoretical concerns such as intellectual contributions to history and archival silences. Using a feminist epistemological framework, this paper takes seriously knowledge produced by a community and thus broadens and strengthens the model of archival stewardship as we know it.