ArchivesSpace Diversity Partnership

In the wake of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor murders, and in the spirit of protest that followed, the ArchivesSpace community began a conversation about what it could do to promote diversity and inclusion while combating systemic racism in our field. That continuing conversation has led to a series of initiatives that we will undertake in the coming years, including the ArchivesSpace Diversity Partnership.

The ArchivesSpace Diversity Partnership offers support for implementing the ArchivesSpace application to institutions that are themselves or primarily serve communities underrepresented in the ArchivesSpace community. Each participating institution is eligible for resources like membership, hosting, training, and user and technical support. This program launched with a small cohort of institutions for a three-year term beginning on July 1, 2021, and concluding on June 30, 2024.

Our Inaugural Cohort

Black Cultural Archives – a unique community archive based in the heart of Brixton, South London, that was established in 1981 to collect contemporary records of Black communities and seeks to transform the understanding of local, national and global Black history.

Detroit Sound Conservancy – deliberately rooted in and informed by Detroit’s community activism, a community-based archive that tells Detroit’s story through the experiences of its musical people.

Spelman College – a liberal arts college in Atlanta that is one of the only two remaining HBCUs founded to educate women of the African diaspora. In addition to being the official college repository, the Archives also documents women of the African Diaspora broadly, and houses the Audre Lorde and Toni Cade Bambara papers.

Weeksville Heritage Center – a historic site, house museum, and cultural center in Brooklyn, New York, whose mission is to use education, the arts and a social justice lens to preserve, document and inspire engagement with the history of Weeksville, one of the largest free Black communities in pre-Civil War America.

Xavier University of Louisiana – the only Catholic HBCU in the country, with historic collections that focus on Black history, New Orleans and Louisiana history, Black Catholics, and the Gulf Coast region, in addition to XULA institutional history.

We’re really excited to work with our cohort members in the coming months and years. We’ll provide more information about the program as this work proceeds.

Hosting for the ArchivesSpace Diversity Partners is being generously provided by our Registered Service Providers Atlas Systems and Lyrasis.