Alternative Archives: A Conversation About Alternative Toronto with Lilian Radovac

Join Lilian Radovac at Interference Archive during NYC Archives Week for a conversation about creating and sustaining alternative community archives. Lilian will speak about her work coordinating Alternative Toronto, an online digital repository that crowdsources documentation of Toronto’s radical, countercultural and trans/feminist/queer communities from 1980 to 1999. She’ll speak about everything from imagining this project to making it real, including the nuts and bolts of building an Omeka-based system, creating interfaces that help contributors share the materials they’ve collected, and spreading the word.

Lilian’s presentation will be followed by a discussion and brainstorming session. Bring your questions and we’ll bring ours! We hope to talk about issues of building and sustaining this kind of community archive, as well as the practicalities of managing a digital-only archive. What barriers do these projects face and how can we overcome them? What does it mean to build community archives in the 21st century, and how can projects like this support each other?

Photo: Rocky Dobey, “After years of tight-fisted colonialism, nothing to smile about,” Queen and Gladstone, 1988.