Information Tools

Grant funds MLIS students' work in community archives

Marika Cifor
Marika Cifor

Community archives are an important way of preserving knowledge and making it accessible, including for historically marginalized groups whose stories are often ignored or misrepresented. Such archives, however, rarely have the resources they need. A new grant will help address some of that problem while giving iSchool students a chance to gain hands-on experience working with community archives.

Marika Cifor, an associate professor at the University of Washington Information School and the principal investigator on the project, has been awarded a $850,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation. Cifor will work at the iSchool with Assistant Professor Temi Odumosu, research scientist Stacey Wedlake of the Technology and Social Change Group, and Ph.D. student Paul Jason Perez. The grant will fund four to six Master of Library and Information Science students per year, for three years, to work with local community archives. The grant is one of nine interconnected grants that were given to information schools in the United States and Canada. 

The grant will give iSchool students, both in the online and residential modes of the MLIS program, yearlong, paid internships with the community archives.

“Practical experience is vital to students,” Cifor said. “This grant helps students gain experience they will need when they go to look for a professional job, and it gives them insight into working with different types of institutions and diverse communities.”

Cifor said the project will let students explore work that they find interesting while building their cultural competency and learning new skills, such as working with new software tools or building a project from the ground up. Cifor is excited about the possibility for the grant to help connect community archives in the Pacific Northwest. And the work will support curriculum development for classes for the iSchool, including on community archives and Black archival practices. 

In addition to supporting the interns by making the positions paid, the grant recognizes that small archives need help to make work like this possible. 

“Archives and libraries are often grossly underresourced,” Cifor said. “That’s especially true of community-based archives. They often don’t have the resources to apply for big grants or those grants might not be right for what they do.” 

The Mellon grant provides $10,000 per year per intern to support the community partners. That money can be used to pay staff or to buy supplies to support the work. 

MLIS students are working with a number of community archives, including:

  • Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project. The grant will help the digital archive in its work to examine the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II to look at the larger issue of incarceration in this country. 
  • Community Archives Center for Tacoma. Cifor and Technology and Social Change Group helped support the creation of this archive, which is a Tacoma Public Library project, through an earlier grant. The Mellon grant will support work to document how climate change affects communities, in particular marginalized communities. 

Cifor is looking forward to mentoring the students and working with the community archives. She’s also excited for the final year of the project, when all of the institutions that received grants will come together at the University of Washington. She hopes the grant helps give community archives a larger presence in the iSchool and makes more memory work possible in our region.