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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Saur February 3, 2017

Community Archives in the Digital Era: A Case from the LGBT Community

  • Anthony Cocciolo EMAIL logo

Abstract:

This project looks at the challenges of establishing a digital community archives. The case that will be explored is that of Front Runners New York, an LGBT running club. The archive documents this small slice of the New York City LGBT community, capturing the impact of the AIDS epidemic and the community's struggle for wide acceptance in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recent triumphs in the 2010s such as the success of the marriage equality movement. This project finds that establishing and maintaining a community digital archive necessitates navigating a complex set of technological and social issues, including ownership and copyright, methods for capturing records, digitization and born-digital record keeping, social media and web archiving, and digital preservation. Using an action-research approach, this paper discusses the solutions developed to address these issues, as well as those that remain unresolved.

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Bionotes

Anthony Cocciolo

Anthony Cocciolo is an Associate Professor at Pratt Institute School of Information in New York City, where he coordinates the MSLIS and Archives programs. His research and teaching are in the archives area, particularly in the digital aspects (such as born-digital archiving, digitization, and computer-mediated access) as well as moving image and sound archiving. He completed his doctorate from the Communication, Media and Learning Technologies Design program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Two of his articles have previously been published in PDT&C: “Learning History through Digital Preservation: Student Experiences in a LGBT Archive,” in 42.3 (2013), and “Mobile Technology, Oral History, and the 9/11 Memorial: A Study of Digitally Augmented Remembrance,” in 43.3 (2014).

Published Online: 2017-2-3

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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