Personal Digital Archiving 2018

Public libraries have long served their communities as stewards of local history. They have traditionally collected print materials that document their regions, but the movement towards increasingly digital and personal publishing has left gaps in the historical record—gaps in the memory of who these communities are, how they communicate, and what they may learn from one another. Due to technical challenges and lack of available training, few public libraries build archives of community history as it is represented on the World Wide Web in particular, though the web has for many years now been where community members connect and share.

In 2017, the Internet Archive received grants for a two-year “Community Webs” project to address this gap in collections and services by providing education, training, and tools to enable 27 public libraries to build collections of historically-valuable, web-published materials documenting their local communities. Speakers representing two of these libraries will discuss how they approach the curatorial and outreach challenges related to building localized special collections representative of the diverse populations that they serve. In particular, they will demonstrate how they include both internal stakeholders at their institutions as well as public stakeholders in the selection process of archiving community websites. They will share the digital literacy takeaways from sessions offered to the public and the lessons taken forward in the planning of future sessions.

Natalie Milbrodt from Queens Public Library, Emily Ward from East Baton Rouge Parish Library and Karl Blumenthal from the Internet Archive will give short individual presentations, followed by a Q&A with the audience.