UCLA’s Community Archives Lab, under the direction of PI Michelle Caswell, received a three-year $331,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to fund the “UCLA/Community Archives Internship Project.” The project empowers local community archives in Southern California to hire 24 UCLA information studies graduate students to complete paid yearlong internships over the course of three years. Students are engaging in vital archival work documenting, appraising, describing, digitizing, and exhibiting community history, as needed by their host organization. This project will be instrumental in helping preserve and make accessible the unknown histories of marginalized communities in Los Angeles, while at the same time increasing the capacity of community archives and providing MLIS students with paid opportunities to gain practical skills, including cultural competency. The project is also producing research that delineates a typology of community archives in order to systematically understand the community archives phenomenon.
2020-2021 Community Archives Sites