Colliding Norms, Community, and the Place of Online Information: The Case of archive.org

The theory of normative behavior (Burnett, Besant, and Chatman, 2001) examines aspects of information behavior in the context of definable social groupings of people, or “small worlds.” Using the concept of “worldview,” derived from the theory, this article examines a controversy that erupted in the Live Music Archive (LMA) of archive.org in November 2005 when access to a collection of live concert recordings by the Grateful Dead was limited. It analyzes posts made by representatives of the archive, participants in the forum, and a small handful of statements made by band members and representatives in order to understand the controversy as an instance in which participants shared some elements of a common worldview but, because they understood those elements differently, emerge as three different small worlds. Archive.org, an online “public library” founded in 1995 to provide access to a wide range of public domain digital materials, houses a collection of concert recordings of the band the Grateful Dead. This collection— like many in the archive, and like many materials housed by and used in public libraries generally—might, in a broad sense, be considered to be “leisure” materials rather than something more substantive. They do not, that is, provide information essential to users for their working lives or for “serious” problems in their day-to-day lives. Rather, they are more directly relevant for users’ more leisurely interests; fans of the band can listen to them for entertainment, collect them for personal reasons, talk about them with each other, and so on. However, as the controversy explored in this article suggests, members of the core audience for the recordings openly define themselves as “Deadheads,” linking their very identities to LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 57, No. 4, Spring 2009 (“Pleasurable Pursuits: Leisure and LIS Research,” edited by Crystal Fulton and Ruth Vondracek), pp. 694–710 (c) 2009 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois Colliding Norms, Community, and the Place of Online Information: The Case of archive.org