Collecting, organizing, and preserving diverse publication sources for the good of one community archive: Ethical and legal challenges and recommendations

Like parks, the streets of a community are shared public spaces whose use needs to be negotiated. The bicycle movement in Indianapolis presents an ideal issue around which to develop a digital community archive, as the geographic and mobile nature of the phenomenon will expose the challenges of capturing both place-bound and digital history as it is happening. Information regarding the movement is current and thus is mostly in a digital form.

Much like changes to the physical landscape of a city, current digital information can be difficult to grasp all at once as it is widely-distributed. This paper will explore the legal issues related to the collection, organization, and preservation of relevant content that is available through the web, sometimes freely and sometimes behind pay walls. A comprehensive list of potential sources (e.g. newspapers, social media sites, blogs) needed to create an archive with the cycling community will be analyzed to identify the types of legal challenges (e.g. privacy, publicity rights, copyright licensing) would likely face.

Recommendations for dealing with these challenges will be made.