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Everyone Archives

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Founder: Ben Compton

Supporting the archiving projects of people working outside of major institutions through workshops, technical resources and social opportunities.

Everyone has a relationship to archiving. Whether you are organizing photo albums, building a music library, collecting recipes, or stressing about the limited storage on your phone, *you* are an archivist. But archiving can feel overwhelming, expensive, and solitary. Tools for preservation can be pricey. The learning curve can be steep. And the labour of doing this work can feel totally unmanageable. Where to start?

Everyone Archives offers workshops in the field of archival preservation, technical resources like sound recorders and photo scanners, and social opportunities for people working on archiving projects independently. Our mandate came out of two recurring conversations with friends, family, and people at work or school. The first was with people expressing a general anxiety around caring for objects with sentimental value, i.e. How do I protect and organize the things that mean so much to me? And the second conversation was around ways in which large institutions like museums, schools and galleries have often excluded or misrepresented certain histories in their archives. A couple of things became clear:

  1. There was a need to put archiving resources back into the hands of those who are best situated to archive their stories with the cultural sensitivity and care that they deserve.
  2. Independent, grassroots archiving is already being done everywhere, all the time. How can this work be supported?

In March 2024, we held our first workshop titled ‘Archival Preservation 101’. The general interest and turnout confirmed there was a need for this kind of initiative. With funding from the Ottawa chapter of the Awesome Foundation, we are offering more programming in Fall 2024. As part of SVZ, we’re also excited to explore the possibility of producing our own archival tools to be sold. Through these different avenues, we hope to not only equip people with preservation resources, but use archiving as a vehicle for intergenerational, intercultural, and interdisciplinary community building.