Our History, Our Stories (OHOS) in partnership with EMKP
post-custodial approaches workshop hosted at the British Museum

     

On the 20th of March 2024, the EMKP team hosted a workshop at the British Museum funded by the Our Heritage, Our Stories (OHOS) project community funds, with attendees from the OHOS project at the University of Glasgow, members of the History Lab at the University of Manchester and the Digital Preservation Coalition. The aim of the workshop was to present the work of the EMKP within the framework of contemporary post-custodial models and provide a practical overview of the processes (including training and workflows for data production and preservation) that the programme has designed and implemented to generate, curate, and digitally preserve community-lead born-digital materials.

The day started off with an introduction by Dr. Ceri Ashley on the Programme’s mission, followed by an overview of previous training material and workflows by Dr. Paula Granados García. OHOS and DPC members highlighted specific areas of interest for the proceedings. These were:

  1. Examples of EMKP’s practice to help communities, researchers, and practitioners to build and share their community-led born-digital materials.
  2. Discussion on community needs regarding data collection, sharing, and preservation.
  3. Different ways of engagement with community groups globally about the production and curation of community-led materials.
  4. Generation, access, and preservation of community-led materials in the framework of the OHOS post-custodial toolkit.

Significance of EMKP – EMKP offers a useful case study for OHOS for a number of reasons:

  • Egalitarian Balance: The vision of EMKP explicitly valorises and celebrates knowledge systems, skills and experience that are typically overlooked or undervalued.
  • Community Directed Foci: EMKP funded projects are externally conceptualised and developed, either by members of the knowledge-holding communities themselves, or in close collaboration with them.
  • EMKP is also a useful case-study for OHOS as it is not dealing with a single ‘community’; to date, over a 100 projects have been supported in 52 countries globally (https://www.emkp.org/ongoing-projects/). The EMKP team are therefore working with a myriad of different priorities, ontologies and cultural values that each project brings, depending on the material, context and community in question.

 To illustrate some of the points discussed EMKP drew five scenarios where obstacles have presented themselves in the past and been overcame through innovative approaches by EMKP projects.

  1. Covid-19 and fieldwork
  2. Areas of conflict and instability
  3. Technological issues
  4. Remote areas
  5. Changing community expectations for data sharing

The following points summarize the conclusions and recommendations that emerged from a day of productive discourse:

  1. Preservation infrastructure must be developed following the principles of the knowledge holders.
  2. Training on archival methods would benefit from validation by members of the professional community and must also give frameworks for delivering results within the proposed timeframe.
  3. Relationships with host institutions and across community projects are key. Lack of trust in institutions is the foremost issue for many projects, hence building local and international support networks is requisite to success.
  4. There is a gap between archival practice and storytelling, particularly in foregrounding local language and agency. More frameworks are needed to address secret/sacred knowledge and the difference between individual and community agency in curating heritage assets.

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