Curating Digital Exhibits in Community Archives

Digital exhibits, a digital genre built on the tradition of physical displays in museums and libraries, have been adopted in digital libraries, humanities projects, and community archives. Digital exhibits can provide new ways of promoting digitized collections and offer the potential to address archival silences and tell the stories of underrepresented groups. While the role and structure of digital exhibits have been explored in the context of academic institutions and public libraries, there is no research examining the methods of creating digital exhibits in local community archives. This presentation will discuss approaches to curating digital exhibits in community archives by using the Park County Local History Archives (PCLHA) as a case. PCLHA is a community archive located in a rural area of Colorado. Its Digital Archive features five digital exhibits about different aspects of local history, immigrant communities, and everyday life. The exhibits were built in collaboration with the University of Denver’s Library and Information Science program. This case illustrates the ways that digital exhibits can provide opportunities for acknowledging and addressing absences, extending coverage, and documenting almost forgotten stories. We will also present additional findings based on analyzing the content of selected exhibits and interviewing people involved in creating them. These findings explore approaches to selecting topics, methods used for constructing narratives, and strategies for presenting social justice topics. The presentation aims to enhance the understanding of the process of creating digital exhibits in local community archives, especially in terms of how to uplift the histories of marginalized communities.