Archive or Record?

The website Documenting Ferguson is a record, but is it an archive? I do not believe so because anyone can easily contribute to the site and also because it has not been given to archivists to maintain, store, and keep as long as possible for the sake of posterity. The website is hosted by Omeka, so if the creators of the site decided to stop paying Omeka to host Documenting Ferguson, the website would disappear. Additionally, if Omeka went bankrupt and stopped hosting website all together, Documenting Ferguson would disappear, too. A real archive would be hosted on a more stable site that is in no danger of going out of business. Since archivists would be looking after it, the site would stay in business longer, too, and as the years progress, the archivists would change it to adapt to new technologies.

Documenting Ferguson is not an archive, but it is a record because it documents information that consists of opinions, facts, and ideas—namely, that of the Ferguson shooting in 2014. As a record, Documenting Ferguson’s site is well done in terms of content, structure, and context. The website’s content is provided by contributions from people who have pictures, audio clips, video clips, or other media connected with the Ferguson case. When you click on an entry in the collection, it brings you to a page with metadata surrounding that item, such as a title, a description, creator, and date added. The collection is extensive; it spans seventy-nine pages. It may not be scholarly, however, because anyone can add anything to the site. While Documenting Ferguson is a website intended for members of the Ferguson community to remember what happened in their own words, it is not as credible, say, as an official report because anyone could post anything on the site. As far as I could tell, there was not a lot of moderation on the items that could be added to the collection. If I were to use this site in a project on the Ferguson shooting case, I would use it to add a personal element to the story, but I may not use it as evidence to back up a claim.

The structure of the site is fairly straightforward. It has only four pages. The “View the Collection” page is the most important aspect of the website, as that is where the information is actually stored. You have to view the collection by date that the specific picture or story was added. There is also a way to view it by tag. Neither of these ways to use the site are very user-friendly, as it is hard to find specific things on the site, yet it does inspire scholarship because a historian has to come to his or her own conclusions based on the things that he or she finds in the website.

Documenting Ferguson could use a little more context. I have never been extremely familiar with the case, so it would have been nice for me if there had been a page summarizing the events of the case to give the items in the record more meaning.

While Documenting Ferguson does not, in my opinion, fit the criteria of an archive, it is an important record. It may not be the most academic source in the world, but that is not its purpose. Its purpose is to allow the people of Ferguson to share their perspectives on the shooting. As such, this website is an important cultural record, especially for continued discussions of racism and police brutality in the United States. I hope that its creators continue maintaining it because this could be an important historical artifact one day.

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