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The Birmingham Black Radio Museum (BBRM) is a community museum and archives located in Birmingham, Alabama (USA) dedicated to preserving and presenting the history of Black radio. The BBRM fulfills this mission through educational programming, providing access to physical and digital materials and supporting emerging curatorial professionals. Through a reflective analysis of the BBRM, the authors discuss the relationship between preservation, public programming and professional outreach, the partnerships that enable these functions and how conceptions of community responsibility have informed the organization’s management strategy. The BBRM provides a context for isolating the factors which inform the emergence of community memory institutions, the challenges associated with managing decentralized information environments and considers how mentorship can operate as a form of capacity building. An examination of the BBRM provides a view of one institution’s approach to engaging community partners and audiences in achieving its primary goal of documentary preservation.

This analysis is informed by historical, case study and autoethnographic methods. Emphasis is placed on examining BBRM’s historical origins, primary functions and community mandates. Specific attention is given to examining operations, resources and strategies. Commentary and discussion are grounded by the professional experiences of BBRM staff and collaborators.

The operations of the BBRM, and the experiences reported by BBRM staff, are similar to those documented by findings in the community archives and museums literatures. Community mandates and institutional identify have strongly informed the BBRM’s mandates, strategies for engaging the public and establishment of strategic partnerships.

This reflective analysis documents the operations of one specific community memory institution. Though the experiences documented in this paper are common to many community archives and museums, this study contributes an additional data point, further contributing to the body of evidence necessary to support a more nuanced understanding of the role and function of community memory institutions and their management.

The aim of this paper is to define the main directions and emerging challenges in adoption of general usability principles by the memory institutions.

Theoretical analysis of usability concepts, usability management processes, methods and evaluation criteria found in the Human‐Computer Interaction professional literature and ISO standards is performed.

Usability should become a part of quality management activities in memory institutions and will change and expand traditional practices in this sphere. ISO standards and theoretical models may be applied to create a framework for usability management in memory institutions both on strategic and operational levels. However, further research in the scope of joint cultural heritage services, audiences, contexts of use and applied technology in the sector of memory institutions should be performed. The main challenges on the way towards the usability framework are cultivation of partnership culture and multidisciplinary teamwork in development and provision of ICT‐based services and application of complex and overlapping recommendations provided by volumnious ISO standards.

The main value of the paper is the comprehensive analysis of state‐of‐the‐art in usability and provision of the main directions and challenges of usability adoption in memory institutions. This analysis maps the future research and practical activities necessary for successful adoption of usability management in libraries, museums and archives.

The aim of the research was to create a site which could host an archive of moving image associated with the town of Fraserburgh in Scotland, but could also include other digital artefacts to support and enhance the narratives contained within the films. Elements of digital storytelling were utilised, and a purposely designed section, “behind the film”, was included within the site which saw stories presented and supported with the use of archive newspaper clippings, photography and a series of reflective audio clips recorded for the research.

“Fraserburgh on Film” is an online platform created for the purpose of collating digital heritage film from the communities situated in the corner of North East Scotland. The research adopted an ethnographic approach working within the community, with James Taylor and other contributors to collect and curate moving images associated with the town. Archival research then supplemented these films. A digital platform was then constructed, tested and launched as the archival repository for the materials collected.

The research highlights the importance of having a close association with the community in question and provides details about the creation of the platform and framing it in the context of a vehicle for digital storytelling and participatory heritage. The article demonstrates how archive film should be gathered, edited and remastered for long-term preservation and access. Practical aspects such as video hosting, searchability, metadata are explored as are subsequent methods of dissemination and engagement.

The research highlights a number of practical decisions which must be made when considering similar projects. These include gaining access to the moving images in the first place but also significant infrastructural issues around the creation, organisation and dissemination of an online digital repository. These lessons are transferable to other small community-based cultural and heritage organisations.

The archive has been very positively received in the community as an important repository for preserving community heritage and identity. High levels of public engagement have been demonstrated since its launch, which has led to new material being discovered. The archive has a wider cultural legacy across the North East of Scotland because of both the nature of the films and the widespread use of the Doric dialect.

The originality lies in the distinctive amount of moving image (and oral history) collected by local historian, James Taylor and his willingness to allow his materials to be edited and repurposed to ensure their long-term survival. The lessons learnt in this project are transferable to other locations in terms of both collecting material, the creation of the hosting platform and in crowdsourcing background information. The crucial importance of working with community partners in digital heritage work is reinforced. The research affords practical illustrations of steps to be taken and factors to be considered. It demonstrates how a well-crafted digital heritage product can genuinely engage with the community.

In this study, specific measures adopted by the social media platforms in China supporting personal information management are investigated via surveys targeting such platforms. The purpose of this paper is to find out how social media platforms understand information management, and from which aspects and through what specific methods they provide support for information management, which contributes to understanding the issues and strategies associated with personal information management on social media.

The dimensions and specific contents of the current platform support provided for information management are clearly defined by performing qualitative text analysis based on the content obtained from 11 platform policies published by five representative Chinese social media platforms.

How social media platforms support personal information management on creation, collection, utilisation, sharing, storage, protection, removal and modification is identified. By analysing the status quo of support provided by the Chinese social media platform, some issues are proposed for discussion. Improved normative management is required to address the coexistence of multivalued information and management risks. However, the user rights are limited because the platform policies tend to be more focused on the perspective of the social media platform. Furthermore, the platform policy contents regarding information management are incomplete, and the applicability of these policies should be improved.

This study seeks to contribute to personal information management on social media from the perspective of platform support. The perspective from the platforms as the service providers supporting information management also helps identify information management challenges and potential strategies. Furthermore, combining with the personal information management perspective, this study provides a background understanding of information management under a social collaborative framework for platforms, authorities, users and memory institutions.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2020-0249

The purpose of this study is to investigate how different types of contribution awareness information influence knowledge sharing motivation and contribution persistence.

The independent variable of this experimental study was contribution awareness information with four levels: self-contribution, absolute social-comparison, relative social-comparison and control. The dependent variables were self-rated knowledge sharing motivation measured on a six-point Likert scale and contribution persistence measured by number of contributions. A total of 182 knowledge workers voluntarily completed online participation. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the four intervention groups.

The study found that the self-contribution group outperformed the other groups in both knowledge sharing motivation and contribution persistence; this observation was significant compared with the absolute social-comparison and control groups. The impact of self-contribution frequency information was stronger for contribution persistence than for self-evaluated knowledge sharing motivation, highlighting the gap between perception and behavior. It is also noteworthy that comparative information negatively influenced knowledge sharing motivation and contribution persistence, implying that social comparison played a role in priming individuals to focus on dissimilarities between the comparison target and themselves.

This study provides behavior-based evidence supporting social comparison theory and the selective accessibility model in the field of knowledge sharing outside of an organizational context. This study also offers the practical advice that participants’ knowledge sharing motivation and contribution persistence, especially newly joining members, can be increased by the inclusion of self-contribution information and conversely decreased by comparative information.

This chapter deploys qualitative interviews with employees of rural South Carolina cultural institutions to assess the state of their rural community archives in order to understand both the practices and needs of the institutions within their relationship to larger, traditional archives with the aim to better understand national trends around community archives.

The research uses open-ended qualitative interviews based on snowball sampling focused on cultural institutions in populations defined as “rural” by the state of South Carolina. Using snowball sampling allowed for communities to self-identify other cultural institutions previously overlooked in surveys of rural South Carolina archival holdings.

Findings from the interviews provide new community-defined understandings of both practices and needs of rural community archives. Valuable insights include the following:

• A clear awareness on the part of rural community archives of their relationship to larger practices of archiving

• Notable moments of creativity by rural community archives concerning long-term self-sustenance

• A continued need for low-cost, low-barrier methods of digital outreach for both preservation and communication

• A more direct stream of access to grant funding favoring community archival practitioners over user-based research funding

A clear awareness on the part of rural community archives of their relationship to larger practices of archiving

Notable moments of creativity by rural community archives concerning long-term self-sustenance

A continued need for low-cost, low-barrier methods of digital outreach for both preservation and communication

A more direct stream of access to grant funding favoring community archival practitioners over user-based research funding

While many examples of community-based archival practice exist within British, Australian, and New Zealand research, such studies remain sparse and entity specific within the United States. This continued lack of case studies and models for understanding and aiding rural, community archives within the United States is only amplified when divided by regions and states. By focusing directly on the concerns of practitioners working to preserve and make available localized histories, this research illuminates both the incredible agency of rural community cultural institutions while re-conceptualizing the needs of such groups.

The relatively under-documented “dark side” of participatory activities facilitated by memory institutions through social media is examined in this study. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the risks and perception of risks resulting from using social media for public engagement and participation.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with fourteen representatives from the New Zealand information and cultural heritage sector who at the time of the study were holding the main responsibilities of overseeing the social media and participatory activities of the institutions they represented.

It is not evident that the growth of social web has significantly changed the way the heritage sector seeks participation. Only a small minority of the sample institutions appear to be using social web tools to build community and to enhance their heritage collections. For the majority, institutional use of social media is for creating a “chattering space”. The main concerns identified by interviewees were reputation management and the risk management process followed by most institutions appeared to be reactive, responding to problems as and when they occurred, rather than proactive about risk identification and avoidance.

Findings are not generalisable as the sample size of thirteen institutions is relatively small and is limited to one national context.

Findings provide insight into largely unexplored issues relating to the development of participatory cultures by memory institutions. The paper highlights a key area where further research is needed, namely to explore whether participatory heritage should primarily be about curated viewpoints or whether it should encompass capturing living dialogues, even when conversations are potentially offensive.

The erosion of ‘trust’ (among citizens as well as within and between institutional levels) is a worrying aspect of these turbulent times in Europe and beyond. Trust (between citizens and institutions, citizens and experts, policymakers and experts, and among different levels of governance) is crucial in all dimensions of disaster resilience. Risk perceptions stem from a complex web of feedback between individuals, communities, institutions, and experts. Sometimes, institutions and experts are slow or even resistant to accepting signals and knowledge about risks coming from the grassroots. Or, it is the other way around, and citizens are skeptical about the information coming from institutions and experts. Thus, trust must work in all directions (from citizens to institutions, from experts to citizens, etc.) to build a cooperative framework for action.

Our article aims to explore the construction of trust and distrust in communities dealing with historical, actual, or potential disasters by putting forward a three-dimensional approach (societal, cooperative, and institutional). We convey the idea that less tangible aspects such as culture, contextual history, knowledge, and habits shape the perception of risk, the degree of preparedness and, ultimately, the impacts of environmental changes.

These elements affect cooperative behaviors, and it is expected that the institutional environment – which will vary across domestic, national, and regional contexts – will play a significant role in nurturing trust or distrust in relation to disaster risk.

This article will offer valuable insights by developing a new conceptual framework that can be translated and validated by future research.

While memory institutions' use of social media has proliferated, research and scholarly literature on risks, resulting from social media use, memory institutions' social media risk-aware culture and, in particular, social media risk management remains scant. This study addresses this knowledge gap and identifies aspects of social media risk management from other sectors that could inform the cultural heritage sector.

This research involves a review of the scholarly and professional literature that contribute to social media risk management discourses. These include those that discuss the different categories of social media risks, social media policies, risk-aware culture and social media risk management strategies and processes. Works discussing social media risk management models and frameworks are also included in the review. Based on the insights gained from these reviews, a pillar framework to guide social media risk management in memory institutions is developed.

The proposed framework outlines the baseline components relevant for the cultural heritage sector and underlines the evolving and continual nature of these components. Elements particularly important to memory institutions are highlighted. Notably, that social risks as a risk category must be recognised. Also noted is that the conventional apolitical stance still taken by many memory institutions need to be reviewed. The importance of memory institutions to be not overly risk-averse to the point of failing to take advantage of the affordances of social media platforms, thereby stifling potential innovations around services and engagement with their users/audience is discussed.

This research offers an extensive review of the social media risk management literature, both scholarly and professional across different domains. The ensuing insights inform the development of a pillar framework to guide social media risk management in memory institutions. The framework outlines a baseline mapping of the governance, processes and systems components. The expectation is that this framework could be extended to account for contextual and situational requirements at more granular levels to reflect the nuances, variances and complexities that exist among different types of memory institutions and to account for varying attributes, mandates and priorities in the cultural heritage sector.

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of a qualitative study exploring the conditions associated with the creation, preservation and transmission of Shuishu archives in China, and the crises today in their preservation and transmission and the reasons behind them. It also proposes activation mechanisms to shift Shuishu archives from jeopardized collective memory to preservable cultural memory.

Semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork were conducted over the course of a month in 2015.

The creation, preservation and transmission of Shuishu archives in the community of the Shui rely upon the community’s closed system. But this system has been broken as a result of modernization and wide use of new media in China. To preserve and transmit Shuishu archives to future generations, there needs to be mutual trust and equitable cooperation between government archives and the Shuishushi. The “cultural consciousness” of the Shui needs to be stimulated, and more members of the Shui and the whole of society need to participate in the preservation and transmission of this distinctive memory.

The study can provide a provocative example for education in preservation and LIS about community culture and archiving, and the preservation of social memory, identity and culture. The activation mechanisms seek to aid in the preservation and transmission of Shuishu archives and other similar community memory.

The study uses semi-structured interviews and ethnographic methodology to develop a rich understanding of the history and the status quo of the preservation and transmission of Shuishu archives. It redefines Shuishu archives and sheds light on the roles government archives should play in the preservation and transmission of Shuishu archives.