Education in community archives: the KARTA Centre and the General Elżbieta Zawacka Foundation

In general, community archives are grass-roots documentary initiatives built around a broadly defined community, which collect, preserve, describe and provide access to historical sources concerning a previously chosen topic, e.g. local history and traditions, a social movement, a minority, an ethnic group, an event or a person. The phenomenon of community archiving is not new, but only several years ago it started to be described by scholars in Poland. The article describes educational activities performed by two biggest and most influential community archives in Poland: the KARTA Centre Foundation in Warsaw and the General Elżbieta Zawacka Foundation in Toruń. Actions of these archives are shown referring to general understanding of education in historical archives, as well as specific situation of Polish archives, especially their mission to promote historical knowledge and local identity. Also promotional qualities of educational endeavours in archives are stressed.