Digital group archives in residential childcare: an investigation into memory responsibility

Abstract

This paper discusses phase two of the ARCH project (Archiving Residential Children’s Homes) and in particular, the development of a co-designed ‘digital archive’ that stores every day, shared events and experiences for care experienced young people who live in residential children’s homes. We present research with young people living in residential care, care workers and care experienced adults about the types of everyday information or records they would like to be able to store, share and access in the future. There was a desire for the digital archive to have a different feel and purpose to content recorded in individual case files, with easy access to the archive, deemed to be important. There were mixed views about the representation of events and experiences and whether these should contain mainly ‘light-hearted’ events and experiences. Our research gives an insight into memory keeping practices within a residential children’s home and invites questions about whose responsibility it is for gathering, filtering and treasuring childhood experiences.