UCI student scholars in the Libraries’ grant-funded C-CAP TEACH program build on and expand community-archiving initiatives

At the close of the winter 2024 quarter, mentors and supporters assembled to celebrate the completion of the latest round of projects for the UCI Libraries Special Collections and Archives (SCA) grant-funded Community-Centered Archives Practice: Transforming Education, Advocacy, and Community History (C-CAP TEACH) initiative. This second cohort of C-CAP student scholars built on and expanded the community archival work of the inaugural cohort. 

The initiative, funded by a four-year $800,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, pairs experiential learning opportunities for UCI students with community-based partnerships. The overall goal of the initiative is for communities and institutions to work together to ethically archive and document the histories of traditionally marginalized communities, both here in Orange County and beyond. 

About C-CAP TEACH and Community Archiving

The C-CAP TEACH initiative builds on the SCA’s community-centered approach. Key components of this work are training UCI students in community-centered archival approaches and building partnerships between academic libraries and their local communities.  

“C-CAP TEACH provides students with hands-on training in ethical archival stewardship and collaborative documentation projects,” said Audra Eagle Yun, one of the initiative leaders and UCI Libraries’ university archivist and head of Special Collections and Archives. 

The goal of community-based archives is to empower communities to tell and preserve their own histories, particularly those that have been misrepresented, absent, or maligned in traditional historical archives. During their paid internships, UCI students learn to apply librarianship and archival techniques within communities.

In addition to its work here at UCI, Eagle Yun explained that the initiative’s long-term goal is to expand and share community-centered archival methods at a national level.

“With the generous funding from the Mellon Foundation,” she said, “we are building a coalition of academic librarians across the United States that are trying to create ethical partnerships in their communities in a long-term way.”

Winter 2024 C-CAP TEACH Cohort

The second cohort of C-CAP TEACH scholars included nine UCI students who were divided into three groups and assigned to one of three Orange County nonprofits. Over the course of a 10-week paid internship, the UCI students learned community archival methods and partnered with their respective nonprofit to develop new community-archiving projects or build upon prior projects.

• VietRISE, a community-based nonprofit seeking to advance social justice and support working-class Vietnamese people and immigrants in Orange County:  Students Ariana Vargas, Clari Gao, and Bradley Sien (pictured above) helped document rent stabilization advocacy efforts in central Orange County. Their work involved preserving related materials and articles, with an emphasis on Vietnamese language sources, and conducting oral history interviews with community members of Santa Ana and Westminster.
• LibroMobile Arts Cooperative (LMAC), a hybrid nonprofit bookstore and arts cooperative in Santa Ana, California: Students Marissa Casas, Valentina Toledano, and Danica Tang built upon the work of the first LMAC student cohort, who created Spanish and English instructional zines to accompany LMAC’s digital archiving and oral history toolkits. The second cohort produced step-by-step video tutorials in both Spanish and English explaining how to gather oral histories and use the LMAC toolkits.
• Second Baptist Church (SBC), the oldest Black church in Orange County, which recently celebrated its 100th anniversary: Continuing the work of the first student cohort, students Claire Moylan, Kalisse Ajlouny, and Maya Bryant helped catalog and preserve materials in the SBC cultural center and developed a finding aid to help SBC better navigate its historical archive.

This spring, several of the Winter 2024 C-CAP TEACH students will also be developing exhibits about their projects that will later be displayed in the Libraries’ Orange County & Southeast Asian Archive (OC&SEAA) Center.

Over the next two years, two additional cohorts of UCI students will join the initiative, continuing to build upon prior cohort archival efforts and projects.

To learn more about special collections and other community-based archival efforts within UCI Libraries, visit the Special Collections and Archives webpage.