For almost all of the projects discussed in this volume, the facilities afforded by different types of digital technology for mutual cooperation have been vital for the creation of a successful community archive. The different chapters illustrate the extraordinary variety of digital tools and methods used in community archives, ranging from the use of familiar commercial platforms such as Facebook to highly innovative exploitation of digital broadcast archives. Some projects enhance community access to heritage materials by digitising them, while others explore the potential of emerging technologies such as 360-degree image capture to allow communities to record and explore their heritage in novel ways. Techniques such as digital storytelling and oral history record experiences of ordinary people that are often missing from conventional archives. Video allows performances, ritual and ceremonies of black minority groups to be recorded. Projects such as Pararchive and tools such as Yarn encourage users to tell their story and turn the archive into a space of yarning. By using threedimensional printing, communities are encouraged to experience data in new, more tactile and engaging ways. We sometimes speak of the digital as if it is a single integrated technology, but it is not. The variety and diversity of approaches illustrated in this volume shows how it might be more appropriate to talk of the digitals.

The story of the growth of community archives is not only the story of an insurgent community movement seeking to create archives that capture the diversity and plurality of human experience. It is also a story of the way in which digital tools lower those barriers that historically excluded and suppressed the voice of the ordinary, marginal, poor and oppressed. The importance of digital affordances in the development of community archives has been noted by many recent commentators. Elise Chenier (2016) argues that digital methods can reclaim the lesbian archive:

Similar claims have been made for archives of indigenous peoples. Since 2012, a major digital repository called Sípnuuk has been created by the Karuk tribe, as a ‘Karuk-centered and decolonized space where knowledge can be accessed and shared through a self-representative lens in alignment with Karuk protocols and laws’ (Karuk Tribe et al, 2017: 312).