eBlack Studies as Digital Community Archives: A Proof of Concept Study in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois

Digital technology facilitates networking together African American community cultural heritage information held by multiple institutions and individuals. This article presents a case study on how African American Studies can participate collaboratively in operationalizing this potentiality. In Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, institutions such as churches, schools, businesses, libraries, museums, archives, and private homes all contain documentation and records of local experiences. Documentation includes everything from oral histories of local elders to master's theses on community evolution. Digital inequalities and the commercialization of cyberspace shape how new possibilities develop. Struggles to achieve digital literacy intersect with the political economy of information. This case study presents an intervention into this reality by using the eBlack Studies framework to demonstrate how campus and community can come together to develop digital community archives. In networking together local African American cultural heritage information, new connections are built both among diffused sources of information and among the social institutions holding this dispersed documentation. Theories and practices from community informatics and library and information science are used in the operationalization of the eBlack Studies paradigm in a local community context. Social capital theory is used to understand the successes and failures of this experimental proof of concept digital community archives. Findings illustrate a critical dialectic between bridging and bonding social capital in community digitization: local, historically underserved communities need bridging social capital to become aware of digital possibilities; they also need to invest bonding social capital into digital community archives to achieve collective, self-determined digital representation. Flows of global economic capital intersect with local forms of social capital to shape the resulting form and use of digital community archives.