On Friday, Oct. 20, the UCR Library will broadcast Forum Four of Diversifying the Digital series, titled: “Integration: Why and How to Address Integration with National Digital Collections Initiatives.”

The forum will discuss how to integrate community archives into a nationwide digital platform and the importance of including diverse communities’ voices in our recordkeeping while respecting cultural protocols, traditional practices, and local conditions governing the collection, preservation, and access to community archives materials.

Those interested can watch the livestream broadcast in Rivera Library, Room 403 from 7:30 am to 1:00 pm, and join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #DDHR4. Forum presenters will include representatives from funding agencies, national digital collections initiatives, traditional libraries and archives, and community archives.

Diversifying the Digital is a collaboration between the Inland Empire Memories project at UC Riverside, the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, the Shorefront Legacy Center, the South Asian American Digital Archive, and Mukurtu. The project was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) National Forum Grants program.

The project aims to address the lack of diversity represented in collections; to develop sustainable networks of community archives resources, programming and collections access at local, regional, and national levels; and to design strategies for increased collaboration with inclusion in national digital initiatives, such as the National Digital Platform.

Diversifying the Digital has hosted three prior forums to facilitate public conversations about collaborative community archives and the composition of our cultural heritage, including digital records. Forum Four will be the last in the series.

“Community archives are traditionally independent entities developed to serve specific communities. They grew out of necessity because of exclusion,” explained Bergis Jules, Project Director for Inland Empire Memories. “Diversifying the Digital has been a tremendous opportunity to explore how we can integrate community archives into national digital collections, organizations, and projects while honoring the individuality and independence of those spaces.”

Funding agencies such as IMLS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are moving toward more collaborative approaches to providing access to digital records, as are national digital cultural heritage projects like DPLA and the HathiTrust, which makes this an ideal time for community archives to determine how best to integrate their work with these efforts.

Records for the first three forums are posted on the Diversifying the Digital website, and can be found on Twitter using the hashtags #DDHR1, #DDHR2 and #DDHR3, respectively.