research-article

We Could, but Should We?: Ethical Considerations for Providing Access to GeoCities and Other Historical Digital Collections

Authors:

Douglas W. Oard,

Katie ShiltonAuthors Info & Claims

CHIIR '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval

Pages 135 - 144

https://doi.org/10.1145/3343413.3377980

Published: 14 March 2020 Publication History

Abstract

We live in an era in which the ways that we can make sense of our past are evolving as more artifacts from that past become digital. At the same time, the responsibilities of traditional gatekeepers who have negotiated the ethics of historical data collection and use, such as librarians and archivists, are increasingly being sidelined by the system builders who decide whether and how to provide access to historical digital collections, often without sufficient reflection on the ethical issues at hand. It is our aim to better prepare system builders to grapple with these issues. This paper focuses discussions around one such digital collection from the dawn of the web, asking what sorts of analyses can and should be conducted on archival copies of the GeoCities web hosting platform that dates to 1994.

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Cited By

Frew LNelson MWeigle MKlein MBen-David AJäschke RKelly M(2024)Making Changes in Webpages Discoverable: A Change-Text Search Interface for Web ArchivesProceedings of the 2023 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries10.1109/JCDL57899.2023.00021(71-81)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/JCDL57899.2023.00021
Konopa BRosa A(2023)Egodokumentalne ślady człowieka w Internecie i ich archiwizacjaArcheion10.4467/26581264ARC.23.006.17866124(190-213)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.4467/26581264ARC.23.006.17866
Hegarty K(2023)Imagining permanence on the web: Tracing the meanings of long-term preservation among the subjects of web archivesNew Media & Society10.1177/1461444823118703127:2(898-913)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231187031
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

We Could, but Should We?: Ethical Considerations for Providing Access to GeoCities and Other Historical Digital Collections
1. Applied computing
  1. Computers in other domains
    1. Digital libraries and archives
2. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Users and interactive retrieval
  2. Information systems applications
    1. Digital libraries and archives

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHIIR '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval

March 2020

596 pages

ISBN:9781450368926

DOI:10.1145/3343413

General Chairs:
Heather O'Brien
University of British Columbia, Canada
,
Luanne Freund
University of British Columbia, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Ioannis Arapakis
Telefonica I+D, Spain
,
Orland Hoeber
University of Regina, Canada
,
Irene Lopatovska
Pratt Institute, USA

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 14 March 2020

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Start Smart Labs
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
US National Science Foundation
Compute Canada

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CHIIR '20

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CHIIR '20: Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval

March 14 - 18, 2020

Vancouver BC, Canada

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Overall Acceptance Rate 55 of 163 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

Frew LNelson MWeigle MKlein MBen-David AJäschke RKelly M(2024)Making Changes in Webpages Discoverable: A Change-Text Search Interface for Web ArchivesProceedings of the 2023 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries10.1109/JCDL57899.2023.00021(71-81)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/JCDL57899.2023.00021
Konopa BRosa A(2023)Egodokumentalne ślady człowieka w Internecie i ich archiwizacjaArcheion10.4467/26581264ARC.23.006.17866124(190-213)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.4467/26581264ARC.23.006.17866
Hegarty K(2023)Imagining permanence on the web: Tracing the meanings of long-term preservation among the subjects of web archivesNew Media & Society10.1177/1461444823118703127:2(898-913)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231187031
Berlin JKelly MNelson MWeigle M(2023)To Re-experience the Web: A Framework for the Transformation and Replay of Archived Web PagesACM Transactions on the Web10.1145/358920617:4(1-49)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589206
Nunes Vilaza GDoherty KMcCashin DCoyle DBardram JBarry M(2022)A Scoping Review of Ethics Across SIGCHIProceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3532106.3533511(137-154)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532106.3533511
Jones ESweeney SMilligan IBak GMcCutcheon J(2021)Remembering is a form of honouring: preserving the COVID-19 archival recordFACETS10.1139/facets-2020-01156:1(545-568)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2021
https://doi.org/10.1139/facets-2020-0115
Lee MPeterson MDam TChalla BRobinson P(2021)Multi-generational Stories of Urban Renewal: Preliminary Interviews for Map-Based StorytellingDiversity, Divergence, Dialogue10.1007/978-3-030-71305-8_26(319-326)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71305-8_26

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