Community Archives Consulting
We want to empower people in our community to capture, save, control, and share their own stories, so we’re here to help when you find yourself asking, “what do we do with all of our stuff?” We offer free support and consulting for individuals and groups with community archives, whether they want to organize materials in a current storage area, create a preservation plan as part of larger reflections on organizational legacy, or find the right repository to house their collections in the future.
Professional archivists from PPL’s Special Collections staff provide free, half-day public workshops that are open to any community practitioner and focus on practical steps and “better than nothing” preservation practices. Participants receive a downloadable workbook and reflective questions to bring back to their organizations. Get in touch if you’d like to participate in an upcoming workshop!
We also offer up to 6 hours of free consulting services that can be tailored to an individual’s or organization’s needs, ranging from a site visit to assess organizational challenges to a discussion with staff and Board members about long-term storage and access goals.
Staff Bios
Kate Wells, Curator of Rhode Island Collections:
Kate Wells has been the Curator of Rhode Island Collections at the Providence Public Library since 2013 after over a decade as an archivist and librarian in university libraries, state historical societies and municipal record collections across the country. In her current role, she focuses on demystifying the experience of collecting and accessing historic materials through supporting community archives, outreach for creative use of library collections and utilizing metadata and semantics in access models. Her professional and personal interests in history often overlap and inform personal explorations into the intersections of history of place, visual arts and contemporary culture. Her mission is to facilitate communication, inclusion, and connections to history in order to catalyze social justice and empowerment in communities and cultural heritage organizations.
Angela DiVeglia, Research and Outreach Librarian for Special Collections:
Angela DiVeglia has served as PPL’s Research and Outreach Librarian for Special Collections since 2015, after several years working in rural and urban public libraries offering reference and technical services. She has also worked as a freelance archivist, helping individuals and families organize and preserve their historic materials for family or community use or for donation to archives or museums. Angela’s interests include social movement documentation and the archives of artists and intentional communities. She was a co-founder of Boston’s Papercut Zine Library, and has processed the on-site archives at the Highlander Research and Education Center, a center for grassroots organizing and movement building in New Market, Tennessee, and at Bread and Puppet Theater, a 50-year-old radical puppetry and theater company in Glover, Vermont. She runs PPL’s annual Creative Fellowship and works closely with artists and visual researchers at the Library.