Saving and Sustaining Community History One Block at a Time: A Case Study on the Marian Cheek Jackson Center and the Convergence of Public History, Community Informatics, and Digital Archives

Intertwining public memory, community archives, and technology, St. Joseph's C.M.E Church, the University of North Carolina's Southern Oral History Program (SOHP), and the Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History documented the legacy of the minority and working class voices within the Northside and Pine Knoll neighborhoods in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Having preserved hundreds of oral interviews with a social justice orientation, the narratives were transformed into a physical and digital archive. This paper uses a case study approach to explore the Jackson Center's ethnographic framework and survey methodology used to entice community participation and examines 1) The application of oral and public history to document marginalized communities that may be underrepresented in traditional archival repositories 2) The definition of community archives 3) The role of Community Informatics in galvanizing support for the digital archives and 4) The implications of archival custody and the future for wider use.Master of Science in Library Scienc