Crossing Fonds

Crossing Fonds

Pollinating Access and Interpretation

Enter Omeka Prototype

Crossing Fonds addresses the need to formalize collaborative access across archives, enabling research, scholarship and the reinterpretation of collections through contemporary filters. The goals are:

  1. Pollinate collaborative archive access and interpretation among not-for-profit, counter, and institutional archives by using participatory design, to plan a replicable open-source digital archive ecosystem that allows generous interaction, study and exhibition.
  1. Enable cross-fertilization and inter-access among records’ dynamic interaction by producing microsites that offer fresh interpretations of content and visualizations of relationships between records, collections and archives.
  1. Apply critical archival theory and practice to challenge the tradition of archival neutrality and often-unquestioned metadata particularly as it applies to records created by or about marginalized groups and Indigenous peoples through metadata critique and annotation and through forms of creative interpretation, including artists’ works, presentations and screenings.

Participating archives hold valuable assets whose use and meaning will be amplified when cross-pollinated through open data tools and a shared space for experimentation. The initial partnership includes OCAD University’s Centre for the Study of the Black Canadian Diaspora and Visual Analytics Laboratory. Simon Fraser University Archives and Library Special Collections and Rare Books, City of Vancouver Archives, the Royal British Columbia Museum, the BC Labour Heritage Centre and VIVO Media Arts Centre and its Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive and collaborator, Black Arts Centre in Surrey and participating researchers from OCAD U, UBC and SFU as well as partner organizations.

Partners will serve on governance committees, contribute expertise in opensource records management and archival best practices to plan the design. They will support 3 case studies, one on British Columbia women’s labour history, a second on Indigenous labour and arts practices, and a third on Black cultural history in the Lower Mainland. They will create artist-in-the-archives, metadata annotation and visualization workshops that will produce microsites that test platform concepts. The goal is a replicable opensource design for a collaborative ecosystem.