BBC Pebble Mill: issues around collaborative community online archives – a case study of the Pebble Mill Project

This chapter considers the Pebble Mill project. The project is a multi-media online resource, with social media interaction on Facebook, where members of an online community build an ‘idiosyncratic archive’ of memories and artefacts, including photographs, videos, audio, and written text, creating a democratic history of BBC Pebble Mill, which complements the BBC's institutional archive. Some of the tensions and limitations of community archive projects are explored, including moderation, ethics, and legal matters, namely defamation and copyright. One of the major challenges for community archives regards the continuing commitment of ‘citizen curators’, the facilitators of online community projects, whose labour includes devising policies, moderating, and encouraging engagement. Issues of longevity and sustainability are considered, along with the vulnerability of online collections in a precarious virtual world, where platforms are subject to evolution, or removal — threatening the survival of small projects.