The Landscape of Community Archives in Poland and Its Contextual Environment

Abstract

Community archives, especially in roughly the last ten years, are becoming an increasingly recognized element of cultural heritage in Poland. This is evidenced, among other things, by growing interest from academics and mainstream cultural institutions, including the state archival administration. Further evidence is the establishment in 2020 of an institution funded by the Ministry of Culture called the Center for Community Archives in Warsaw, which aims to support grassroots archives. Although the phenomenon of community archives exists in many countries around the world, the literature focuses in particular on countries from the Anglophone world, especially the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The purpose of this article is to expand the scholarship by describing the contemporary landscape of community archives in Poland. Since the landscape of community archives (regardless of location) is complex and susceptible to a variety of contexts, this description of the phenomenon is presented based on six categories (impact factors) developed during comparative studies of community archives in the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Poland. These contextual conditions, which are also essential parts of the results section describing the contemporary reality of community archives in Poland, are terminologies and definitions of “community archive”; typologies and characteristics of community archives; recent history and social structure of the place; archives’ relations with external partners; funding and support; and legal environment and national archival and heritage system.