Community Archives

Community archives can benefit from using AVAnnotate in a number of ways. A community archive is a community-led (or community-governed) effort to collect, describe, preserve, and share records that document the experiences, histories, and cultural knowledge of a particular group—especially materials that have been overlooked, misrepresented, or controlled by external institutions.

How community archives can benefit from using AVAnnotate

• Layered community context around AV materials: Publish time-stamped annotations, index terms, and project narratives that keep community knowledge attached to recordings rather than separated into external finding aids.

• Supports plural voices and perspectives: Maintain distinct annotation sets (e.g., community narration, curator notes, researcher commentary, machine-transcript drafts), enabling multiple truths without collapsing them into a single “official” description.

• Improves discoverability without sacrificing nuance: Indexing and structured annotation make long recordings more navigable while preserving complexity and contextual warnings.

• Accessibility-forward workflows: Integrate transcripts/captions, alt text, and accessibility checks as a baseline practice to make community materials usable by more people.

• Interoperable, standards-aware publishing: Benefit from IIIF-oriented, web-based delivery patterns that improve portability and reduce lock-in.

• Transparent documentation and reproducible practice: AVAnnotate’s emphasis on documenting workflows helps community archives formalize consent, access, and description processes in ways that are legible to participants and partners.

• Flexible deployment options: Use public sites when appropriate and consider private/offline or alternative-server pathways when sensitivity or safety requires it.

• A practical pathway to reciprocity: Pair publication with skill-sharing and co-authorship/credit practices, supporting community members as producers of knowledge—not just sources.

What community archives should consider when using AVAnnotate

Ownership and control

• Who owns the recordings and associated metadata/annotations? • Who has decision rights over description, publication, revision, and takedown?

• Do participants understand how annotation and web publication can change the reach and meaning of a recording? • Is there a clear process for withdrawal, redaction, or changing access conditions?

Sensitivity, safety, and potential harms

• Could public access expose participants to harassment, surveillance, or mis-contextualization? • Are there cultural protocols for restricted knowledge, sacred content, or community-only circulation?

Access model and hosting choices

• Should the project be public, community-only, or restricted? • Does the material require offline/private hosting rather than open GitHub Pages-style publication?

• Are rights and reuse terms documented in plain language? • Are there fair use assumptions that won’t hold for community priorities or safety needs?

Metadata justice and respectful description

• What language is appropriate, who determines it, and how will contested terms be handled? • How will you support community review and correction of the description over time?

Sustainability and preservation

• What is the preservable “package” (media, annotations, metadata, documentation), and where will it live long-term? • Who maintains the site, updates dependencies, and retains institutional knowledge if staff/volunteers change?