Archives on Two Wheels: Archival Practices of Bike Co-operatives

Bike co-operatives are important organizations in their communities, offering bicycle educational and repair services for little to no cost. Yet they often occupy precarious positions, and their histories and work are not well preserved within existing archival institutions. This study seeks to uncover the ways in which bike co-op are already archiving their own materials and how archivists can assist them in this work. The study is based around interviews with members of bike co-ops about the perceptions of their co-ops’ archival practices. It seeks to answer these questions: 1) How are volunteer-run bike co-ops already archiving the work that they do? 2) What form, if any, do these archives take, and are they guided by any pre-existing organizational principles? 3) What can archivists offer to these co-ops to better assist them in preserving these histories? And 4) After this knowledge is gathered, how can an interested archival professional, or even a member of a bike co-op without archival knowledge, go about starting a formalized archive for these organizations?