The Chinatown Library Digital Archives Project: A Story of Community, Memory, and Technology
Abstract:
Developments in digital technologies are making it more possible for previously neglected and buried communities to document
themselves, allowing diverse peoples to (re)discover and (re)claim their identities and experiences and (re)capture their memories.
These communities act as agents in the creation, collection, preservation, and dissemination of their own historical and cultural
narratives, while (re)producing these narratives as information resources in archival systems for themselves and the larger society—
“iSociety” . Their participation in these information production and archival processes is not only changing the kinds of stories that
are being told in content, but it is also reshaping the ways in which the stories are being told in form. How these stories are
remembered and represented in archival formations and information systems that house collective memory and communal
knowledge is being (re)conceived and (re)conceptualized through the use of digital technologies that simultaneously re-imagines
those systems and structures in the communities to serve their needs, as well as aspirational desires. Information systems and
archival formations are participatory practices in communities that create communities of belonging while also documenting,
collecting, preserving, and displaying their information sources and archival records.
The Los Angeles Chinatown Library was a “dream” 12-years in the making for the Chinese American community in the Chinatown
neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles. It began in 1971 with one person’s desire to have a neighborhood library for the growing
population of Chinese Americans and “new” (post-1965) Chinese immigrants who lived in the area in the later decades of the 20th
century. It grew into a community effort that gathered support from the greater Chinese American community in Los Angeles and
state board until the library opened its doors at a local elementary school in 1983.
Addressing the 2009 iConference themes of cultural information systems and memory institutions for ethnic communities, The
Chinatown Library Digital Archive Project poster will illustrate how one community-based organization is beginning to engage
new technologies in collaboration with its community to the create the digital information resources and archival systems that will
give “voice” and make “visible” the memories of the Los Angeles Chinatown Library and the story of community collaborated that
created a “space” or “home” of knowledge, information, and learning for the community to inhabit .
Memories as the past live in us, with us, and through us: “Memories establish a connection between out individual past and our
collective past (our origins, heritage, and history). The past is always with us, and it defines our present; it resonates in our voices,
hovers over our silences, and explains how we came to be ourselves and to inhabit what we call ‘our homes’” (Agnew 2005, 3). And
from an information and archival perspective, memories need to be documented in some way, made as record, collected and
preserve, because without such records made from memories there would be no knowledge and evidence of the past. Sue
McKemmish says, “Recordkeeping is a ‘kind of witnessing’. On a personal level it is a way of evidencing and memorializing our
lives—our existence, our activities and experiences, our relationship with others, our identity, our ‘place’ in the world (1996, 29).
Records are windows into history, the presence and practices of people in society; they document lives and social life. And when
people die the memories of their experiences go with them if they (their experiences) are not documented in someway. “At a more
profound level, destroy the memory—the evidence that those peoples ever lived in that place—and those, cultures never existed at
all” (McKemmish, 39-40). Records needs to made, i.e., actively produced, to ensure all pasts are preserved, because there can
never be too many records of a past that was never documented in the first place from the point-of-view of those who lived the
experiences that made their histories in communities.
The increased availability of and access to digital technologies are compelling and propelling previously submerged communities
into alternate sites of knowledge production as they use new media to capture oral histories and other documentary evidence to act
as (an)other record of themselves: their histories, memories, and experiences. This poster presentation will demonstrate how the
Chinatown Library Digital Archives Project combines oral history methodologies with visual documentary practices and digital
archiving technologies to create its own “memory institution” to record and remember community knowledge, history, and culture.
References
Agnew, Vijay. 2005. Introduction. In Diaspora, Memory, and Identity: A Search for Home . Edited by Vijay Agnew. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
McKemmish, Sue. 1996. Evidence of me… Archives and Manuscripts 24 (1): 28-45.