Abstract
Community-led documentation initiatives have proliferated alongside declining state archival budgets, but their holdings occupy an ambiguous institutional position. Drawing on interviews with 34 practitioners across seven projects, this paper examines how participants themselves negotiate the label of archive. We find that claims to archival status are strategically deployed to secure funding and legitimacy, while internally the same collections are described in the vocabulary of memory work. The gap is not merely rhetorical: it shapes what gets preserved and what is allowed to decay.