The University Archives at UW-Madison hold a unique and ever growing community archive that documents the LGBTQ+ community in Dane County, WI, where Madison is located. What started out as an oral history project in 2007, the archive began collecting physical materials, audio/video, photographic media, and other ephemera in the fall of 2015. Realizing this was an important community/university partnership, an advisory group was formed and is now made up of community members (many of which are artists, social justice advocates, and community organizers), staff, faculty, and students. To date, the majority of the collection development, donor relations, and fundraising is spearheaded and executed by the community members of the advisory group, while the care and maintenance of the collections is handled by the archives staff and students. The presenters, the University Archivist and the Processing Archivist, will discuss the unique model of having a community advisory group manage, fundraise, and do collection development for a community archive. Additionally, we will discuss the origins of the community archive (including historic and ongoing fraught relationships between the University and the LGBTQ+ community in Madison), overall challenges and opportunities, collection strengths and gaps, and strategies for programming and fundraising. The LGBTQ+ archive is one of the many outreach initiatives within the University Archives that is designed to actively collect the stories of underserved populations and acquire missing stories from the University and the Dane County community. Moreover, the advisory group is a proven innovative collaboration that is becoming a well oiled machine and we’d like to share our recipe for success as well as lessons learned.
