Community Archives

We believe strongly in empowering communities to capture, save, control, and share their own stories. The act of documenting history is powerful and available to all of us. Because we actively encourage Rhode Islanders to interpret, analyze, and use historic resources to participate in and understand history, PPL promotes a number of initiatives that support community archives.

What are community archives?  They are collections of materials - in all sorts of formats - that are created by people and community groups to document their shared experiences, art and activism, cultural history, identity and heritage. Community archives are created by and for the groups that they represent.

We work with content creators who want to organize and preserve their own materials within their communities, offering free consulting and support, and we also collect and preserve community collections at PPL while working to make them accessible to as many researchers as possible.