The Co-archiving Refugee Documentation project is based upon a collaboration between Living Archives and the Flyktingdokumentation/Refugee Documentation project run by the Regional Museum in Kristianstad, Malmö Museums, Kulturen Museum and the Department of Cultural Sciences, Lund University. The one year long collaboration has among other things resulted in a concept for co-archiving facilitation referred to as the Co-archiving Toolbox.
The Co-archiving Toolbox is a concrete method for increasing the diversity in public archives, and developed to be used by archivists and museum professionals who are interested in assuming a co-archiving facilitation approach by engaging the subjects (the “archived”) in the shaping of archives. The toolbox currently includes seven co-archiving practices designed to invite unheard voices to share and document their experiences from their point of view and not through the lens of the “other”, that is, those who gather the documentation, interview, filter, select and archive.
The Co-archiving Toolbox housing seven co-archiving practices (CC:BY-NC).
The toolbox is right now (Nov-Dec 2017) being tested in the field on two different locations. Based on the insights from the test sessions and the archival material generated, the toolbox will be evaluated, and re-designed once more. The final step is to turn the co-archiving toolbox concept into an open source kit (Creative Commons licensed CC BY 4.0), where the physical box (instructions for how to build it) and all its materials and a handbook, are made available to digitally download and re-produce.
Building the toolbox in the K3 workshop (CC:BY-NC).
The Co-archiving Toolbox concept and the co-archiving practices were developed in a co-design process involving museum professionals and refugees. For more information about the process and previous collaborations, see:
We wish to direct our gratitude to Mattias Nordgren and Johannes Nilsson at K3, Malmö University, for their support when building the toolbox.
For more information about the co-archiving project, please contact:
Elisabet M. Nilsson, elisabet.nilsson@mah.se or
Sofie Marie Ottsen Hansen, sofie.marie.ottsen.hansen@mah.se