“Who Will Maintain the Archives of Occupy Wall Street?”

Sunday, August 5, 2012
5 – 7 pm
A solutions-oriented discussion for dealing with the collection of physical items from Occupy Wall Street; this collection includes signs, pamphlets, flyers, meeting notes, sculptures and other art objects that span 10 months of the Occupy Movement, collected by the working group mostly in and around Liberty Plaza in New York City.
To be clear, while members of OWS Archives have drawn on personal resources to steward this collection in storage, this is not a sustainable solution given our current resources and it does not achieve our objective to provide a functioning archive for the movement.
Currently, our primary option to ensure the long-term preservation and open access to the OWS Archives is donating the collection to the Tamiment Archive at New York University, with whom many other OWS working groups have worked successfully. Tamiment collections document the history of radical politics, the political Left, social movements, and the labor struggle in NYC and its core mission is to preserve the history of the Left and multi-faceted movements for social change; in addition, Tamiment has access to an excellent preservation department, stable funding sources, and a good organizational structure.
Still, we encourage you to explore your resource networks and bring practical and realizable solutions that can help us faithfully maintain, preserve, and provide access to this collection and/or donate items to one or several acceptable archival institutions. We expect to find an acceptable decision based on consensus — if not, then 9/10ths majority — by the conclusion of this meeting.