The University of Arizona College of Information Science will help more students – especially those from historically underrepresented backgrounds – get paid internships in community archives, thanks to a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation's Public Knowledge Program.

The grant will support the work of a collaborative of library and information sciences faculty members from nine universities across the U.S. and Canada, including the U of A. The collaborative is called FOCAS, which stands for Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support. 

The funding to the U of A is part of $6.1 million the Mellon Foundation awarded across all FOCAS institutions. The three-year program will place library and information science graduate students with over 40 community archives in the United States and Canada. The project will also fund student participation in conferences and professional associations.

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Jamie A. Lee, associate dean for faculty affairs and associate professor in the College of Information Science, is the principal investigator for the U of A grant. The grant is part of Lee's work helping to lead the college's co/lab: the Critical Archives and Curation Collaborative.

Institutional archives, including some housed in libraries and museums, hold records created by or received by their parent institution. They are most often used by historians and other researchers. Community archives, on the other hand, are most often directed by the communities themselves. 

"The key difference with a community archive is that members of the community whose stories the archive aims to tell are deeply involved with how the archive is built and managed," said Lee, whose research for nearly two decades has centered on community archives and community storytelling. 

Community archives also often allow community members to maintain control over the materials and stories they've shared, removing them from the archive or limiting access depending on a community member's needs or desires.

Tucson has several community archives, including the Dunbar Pavilion African American Arts and Cultural Center, the Mexican American Heritage Museum, and the Arizona Queer Archives, which Lee founded in 2008 and is housed in the university's LGBTQ+ Institute.

"Historically, community archives have emerged from within marginalized communities because how their stories have been told through institutions has often been based on deficit-driven demographics that fail to encompass the full and rich lives of marginalized folks," Lee said. "Community archives can offer a fuller dimension about what it means, locally, to live here in the borderlands, to be Latino/Latina, African American, Black, Indigenous or queer."

Over the next three years, the U of A FOCAS team will use the grant funding to provide 30 paid internships for students in the College of Information Science's Master of Library and Information Science program.

The project aims to be a "win-win" Lee said, with the community archives benefitting from resources and students learning community-centered approaches to professional archiving. 

"The idea is for students to be at the table with the community and see how community archives work in the process of building a collection, making it accessible, doing outreach – you start to see how it's different when the community is involved," Lee said.

The grant will also give $10,000 to each partnering archive and support a project to map community archives across the U.S. and Canada – a long-sought resource among community archivists. The first iteration of the map is expected to publish by fall 2025, Lee said.

"The work that Dr. Lee and the FOCAS team are doing is crucial for helping communities more deeply and honestly tell and reflect on their own histories," said University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins. "I am grateful that the Mellon Foundation has recognized the university's leadership in this work and will help our faculty and student expertise reach community archives across the country." 

The FOCAS project is closely aligned to programming the university has long had in place to help expand access to careers in library and information science to people of more diverse backgrounds. The College of Information Science's Knowledge River Scholars Program has been doing similar work since 2001.

"Knowledge River has been a model for community-based student work experience here at the College of InfoSci," said Berlin Loa, associate professor of practice and program manager for Knowledge River. "The FOCAS project allows us to continue to work with people locally and with our partners across the nation doing similar work with marginalized communities. Our partners and community members benefit from the scholars working to support community-driven projects, and students gain valuable work experience and mentoring. This is transformative work in reimagining archival practices, how closely place is related to archives and community memory, and archives as a whole."

The U of A's statuses as a land-grant institution, a Hispanic-Serving Institution, and an American Indian and Alaska Native-Serving Institution, Lee said, make it uniquely positioned to expand access to careers in community archives.

"We're demonstrating what this looks like," Lee said, "to be a part of these conversations around building our local capacity to make community histories stronger with students right there helping to support their efforts and learning directly from the community."

The other institutions in the FOCAS collaborative are the University of California, Los Angeles; Dominican University in Illinois; East Carolina University in North Carolina; the City University of New York; McGill University in Quebec, Canada; the University of British Columbia; the University of Washington; and the University of Chicago's Black Metropolis Research Consortium.