The Project | The Pararchive Project

"The aim of the project is to co-produce a new ‘open’ digital resource that will allow anyone to search and collect on-line resources and to combine them with their own media (film, photographs and other ephemera) in order to tell their own stories, make new archives, be creative, start new projects and do their own research. It will, for example, allow communities to research and document their histories via the creative linking of their own digital content with archival material from public institutions such as the BBC and the Science Museum.  While there are many existing websites and tools that allow people to use public archival material, they are usually either commercial or institutional, which means that they are hosted within controlled spaces that constrain what and how digital content can be used. We want to work with communities to develop new resources from the ‘bottom-up’ (instead of the conventional ‘top-down’), and hope to co-produce a more open resource that functions effectively for a diverse range of users and communities, and which facilitates creative use of public archival content. Pararchive will be a resource that, we hope, will become the ‘go-to’ place for community research, a one-stop-shop which both draws together existing online resources and tools in one place and allows us to think beyond existing provision and develop innovative new tools.  We think the only way to achieve this is through collaborative working and that is why we are so pleased to be collectively researching and designing the resource ..."