Capturing Community Memory with Images

Around the world, communities are examining the issues of preserving cultural identity, documenting local history, promoting tourism and examining their shared heritage. Many communities have relied on official records, tradition, customs, stories (both oral and written), language, myth and similar means for the preservation of cultural identity and community memory. The Magee Community Collection (Leath, 2004) began in 1999 as an exploration of how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) might be used as a means of augmenting community memory through the provision of interactive and widely distributed ways of gathering, indexing and archiving multimedia assets. It was hoped that with time and effort cohesive processes and associated tools for these tasks would emerge (Leath, 2000). No established standards for processes and associated tools existed at the time of initial development, and it is anticipated that diversity in approaches, development and structure of community memory multimedia archives will exist for some time to come.