From the Archive-It team:

If you were a K12 student which websites would you want to save for future generations? What would you want people to look at 50 or even 500 years from now?

These questions are central to the K12 Web Archiving Program, a partnership between the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress. Now wrapping up its second year, with 12 schools in 11 states around the country, this innovative program provides a new perspective on saving history and culture, allowing students to actively participate and make decisions about what “at risk” website content will be saved. The decisions they make help them to develop an awareness of how the Web content they choose will become primary sources for future historians studying our lives.

The program uses Archive-It, a web archiving service from the Internet Archive, to capture born digital content from the Web to create collection “time capsules.” Students decide the type of collections and the specific websites to be captured, attaching a brief description to every one so that people in the future will know why they chose this content. By allowing students to identify websites that will be preserved for the long-term, the program gives teens and younger students a chance to identify and document their cultural history and the world that’s important to them. Unlike time capsules of tangible objects, which usually remain hidden for decades or centuries, the resulting Web collections are immediately visible and publicly accessible, with full text search for study and analysis.

Any teachers that are interested in this program, please visit the application website for more information and to fill out an application for the 2010/2011 school year.  Applications are due by July 2.

To see collections that students have created in the first two years of the program, please visit the program website.

-Jeff Kaplan