Participation, Collaboration, and Community Building in Digital Repositories

This article explores the world of digital repositories and how the advent of Web 2.0 has encouraged the rise of participation, collaboration, and community building. The three types of digital repositories that are described include digital history projects, community archives, and digital collections. The author defines each term, provides examples, and explains how the difference of provenance between each repository ultimately leads to more collaboration in the digital world. Various examples demonstrate just how prevalent participation, collaboration, and community building has become in the archives field. The overall shift toward communal experiences in digital repositories can be seen not just inside the archives and library fields but also outside of these fields. This opens the door to further research into these trends.