Documenting Communities of Practice: Making the Case for Archival Ethnography*

Abstract

This paper seeks to present a new direction for archival research: ethnographic fieldwork. The author argues that this set of qualitative methods presents new opportunities for researchers to study phenomena in archival settings. Using the author’s research on competing definitions of value in the world of film preservation as a case study, this article gives readers unversed in ethnography and grounded theory a primer which may be used as a starting point for considering how to apply such qualitative methods to the design of new research agendas and to solve questions specific to the archival domain.