Community Collaborative Participatory Archive (CCPA): Towards a New Archival Practice in Ethnomusicology

This article addresses the gaps between ethnographic archives and community members who are often deprived of accessing their own materials. In reflecting on results from collaborative research with a Nepalese immigrant community in Alberta, Canada, where we created a Digital Community Archive (DCA), I draw attention to the benefits of combining strategies from applied ethnomusicology and Participatory Action Research (PAR). I propose a new model for archiving in ethnomusicology, the Community Collaborative Participatory Archive (CCPA). This model can improve ethnomusicological archival practice by focusing on collaborative, egalitarian, and grassroots participation, shared roles, and authority in the archival creation and development process.