The following guest post from Joanna Kolosov, Librarian and Archivist at the Sonoma County Library in California, is part of a series written by members of Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. Community Webs advances the capacity of community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories.
Sonoma County Library joined Community Webs back in 2017, the same year the North San Francisco Bay was hit by devastating wildfires. Realizing that much of the stories, video and information about the emergency response, aftermath and recovery efforts was being shared online and constantly changing, we sensed the urgency to capture stories as the crisis unfolded and the community navigated new territory. We received our new Archive-It account and started learning by doing, creating the “North Bay Fires, 2017” collection.
One of the first websites we archived was cartoonist Brian Fies’ blog, The Fies Files, where he posted a webcomic that he penned in the days following the fire that consumed his house and much of the neighborhood of Coffey Park. He later published it as a graphic memoir called A Fire Story. Preserving the first draft from his blog, we have also saved the numerous comments elicited by his powerful and intimate account.
Also included in the North Bay Fires collection is a video by Sutter Health recounting how staff at the Santa Rosa Regional Hospital came together to evacuate the hospital in the early hours of October 9th. Combining firsthand accounts and security camera footage, Firestorm: The First Hours shows healthcare workers rising to the challenge of an unprecedented emergency.
The collection also features websites of volunteer-run groups that sprung up to meet the needs of their communities, providing essential information about cleanup and rebuilding, disaster preparedness, and disaster relief. Some examples include Coffey Strong, a site that provided resources to the community on comparing builders, debris removal, and landscaping. Fire Safe Occidental included evacuation and cell coverage maps as well as a wildfire action plan. UndocuFund.org was the online presence of a mutual aid project set up to help the county’s most vulnerable residents.
Some of the archived content in the collection reflects on past wildfire disasters, such as “The Forgotten Fires of Fountaingrove and Coffey Park,” a blog post by the late Jeff Elliott, author of SantaRosaHistory.com, who places the fire phenomenon in its broader historical context. Reporters Eric Sagara and Patrick Michaels traced the development of unchecked growth in the wildfire path in the March 14, 2018 episode of Reveal’s podcast “Built to Burn.” Stepping back even further allows us to consider the history of the landscape. In a video posted by staff of the Bouverie Preserve, fire ecologist Sasha Berleman compares past policies of fire suppression with a deeper understanding, grounded in Indigenous knowledge and stewardship and the impact of fire on ecosystems. The archive also documented the aftermath in the years following the fires, showing evidence of how the community continued to regroup, remember, and recover.
Following the Los Angeles fires of January 2025, this collection has taken on new meaning as an archive of resilience and hope, offering testimonies of recovery and regrowth for LA fire survivors.
The experience of documenting the 2017 wildfires prepared us for preserving Sonoma County’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020. The Sonoma Responds project was an online archive that invited our community to collectively build the historical record of living through COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter movement and the impacts of these events on daily life locally. Members of the public could upload a photo, audio/video file, or PDF that embodied their experiences and impressions of life in lockdown. We also encouraged people to nominate a website, webpage, blog post, news article, or online video for inclusion in the web archives. While we expected to receive links to news articles and the like, most submissions were from content creators, nominating their music videos, journals and blogs. These included singer/songwriter Chris Herrod’s album, I Don’t Play Xmas Songs, I Play Coronavirus Songs (watch all 10 tracks by clicking the “play” button in the Wayback banner at the top of the page). Michael Mann created a series of live journal entries on his blog “riding the viral apocalypse” that documented the mundane to the surreal happenings of pandemic life. “Book of Days: A Covid Kitchen Chronicle” was created by Liat Goldman Douglas, who described herself as “a mom and elementary school teacher presently working with a neighborhood Pandemic Pod of Tk-2nd graders; baking my way through and sharing my story as I go.”
Another notable submission encapsulating that time was a crowdsourced list of Black-owned restaurants and businesses in Sonoma County, an effort that has since been expanded to include Native, POC-immigrant, and people of color-owned businesses.
Now more than ever, we recognize and appreciate the value of preserving the web to ensure that reliable sources of information, vital pieces of the historical record, endure. To that end, the library is embarking on a new collection—Community Roots/Raíces Comunitarias—a shift from event collecting to preserving the websites of local organizations who work to support the needs and aspirations of marginalized groups.
This change in focus warrants a new approach to collecting, as we seek permission from organizations to archive their web content. This requires us to be intentional and transparent about our collecting. This accountability acknowledges the asymmetrical relationship between archival institutions and communities of color that has led to mistrust, silencing, and harm; it is vital in maintaining equitable partnerships. It is also an opportunity to let local organizations know who we are and the preservation work we have been doing.
We hope this opens a dialogue and leads to future collaboration. At the very least, it is a chance for the library to say, “What you are doing in our community matters, and the library is here to support, celebrate and further your work.” So far, we’ve received an enthusiastic response from organizations such as Positive Images, an LGBTQIA+ Community Center, and the North Bay Organizing Project, a social justice coalition.