We are excited to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded nearly $50,000 through its Digital Humanities Advancement Grant program to UC Berkeley Library and Internet Archive to study legal and ethical issues in cross-border text data mining research. NEH funding for the project, entitled Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining – Cross Border (LLTDM-X), will support research and analysis that addresses law and policy issues faced by U.S. digital humanities practitioners whose text data mining research and practice intersects with foreign-held or licensed content, or involves international research collaborations. LLTDM-X builds upon Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining Institute (Building LLTDM), previously funded by NEH. UC Berkeley Library directed BuildingLLTDM, bringing together expert faculty from across the country to train 32 digital humanities researchers on how to navigate law, policy, ethics, and risk within text data mining projects (results and impacts are summarized in the white paper here.)
Why is LLTDM-X needed?
Text data mining, or TDM, is an increasingly essential and widespread research approach. TDM relies on automated techniques and algorithms to extract revelatory information from large sets of unstructured or thinly-structured digital content. These methodologies allow scholars to identify and analyze critical social, scientific, and literary patterns, trends, and relationships across volumes of data that would otherwise be impossible to sift through. While TDM methodologies offer great potential, they also present scholars with nettlesome law and policy challenges that can prevent them from understanding how to move forward with their research. Building LLTDM trained TDM researchers and professionals on essential principles of licensing, privacy law, as well as ethics and other legal literacies —thereby helping them move forward with impactful digital humanities research. Further, digital humanities research in particular is marked by collaboration across institutions and geographical boundaries. Yet, U.S. practitioners encounter increasingly complex cross-border problems and must accordingly consider how they work with internationally-held materials and international collaborators.
How will LLTDM-X help?
Our long-term goal is to design instructional materials and institutes to support digital humanities TDM scholars facing cross-border issues. Through a series of virtual roundtable discussions, and accompanying legal research and analyses, LLTDM-X will surface these cross-border issues and begin to distill preliminary guidance to help scholars in navigating them. After the roundtables, we will work with the law and ethics experts to create instructive case studies that reflect the types of cross-border TDM issues practitioners encountered. Case studies, guidance, and recommendations will be widely-disseminated via an open access report to be published at the completion of the project. And most importantly, these resources will be used to inform our future educational offerings.
The LLTDM-X team is eager to get started. The project is co-directed by Thomas Padilla, Deputy Director, Archiving and Data Services at Internet Archive and Rachael Samberg, who leads UC Berkeley Library’s Office of Scholarly Communication Services. Stacy Reardon, Literatures and Digital Humanities Librarian, and Timothy Vollmer, Scholarly Communication and Copyright Librarian, both at UC Berkeley Library, round out the team.
We would like to thank NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities again for funding this important work. The full press release is available at UC Berkeley Library’s website. We invite you to contact us with any questions.
In the fifth session of “Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web” – a joint series of events with Internet Archive, METRO Library Council, and Library Futures – “Decentralized Apps, the Metaverse, and the ‘Next Big Thing,’” Internet Archive Director of Partnerships Wendy Hanamura took a deep dive into the metaverse and NFTs through an exploration of virtual worlds with pioneering metaverse developer Jin.
Watch session:
In this engaging session, Hanamura and Jin explored the technologies that would transform the future and the world as we know it within Web 3.0: the immersive spaces and built communities of the metaverse. As indicated by participants, to some, NFT and metaverse means “cyberspace on steroids,” or “Second Life,” while for others it holds a more negative connotation. From the “read-only” Web 1.0 to the forthcoming “read-write-trust verifiable” future of Web 3.0, the evolution of the web is leading to an enhancement of reality to create new and augmented realities.
An NFT, or an entry on a blockchain, can be anything from a document to even a virtual representation of a physical space like the Internet Archive. Jin, for example, is able to create a complete virtual desktop where their entire life and memory lives in 3D, and where they conducted the virtual reality interview with Hanamura. From hacker spaces to raves to the virtual representation of the Internet Archive they built as a central space to conduct their work, Jin’s life is mediated and defined through their virtual world building.
What makes Jin’s world unique is their commitment to building with other people in the open source community in an “interesting, collaborative, co-creation.”
Within these worlds, one of the key provisions is interoperability: the ability to carry these worlds between each other. For Jin, this is still a work in progress, with new modes of interoperability still being built. In addition, privacy is a major concern – Web 3.0 provides a new form of privacy through avatars and other obscuring technology, but Jin cautions that due diligence is still warranted, just like in the real world.
The conversation ended with a discussion of the democratizing aspects of NFT creation and independent artists. As an artist, Jin’s first NFT earned him more money than he ever had previously in his career. One of the most exciting aspects of this kind of creation is the way it removes the middle person from the art market: rather than creating for museums or other art markets, Jin is able to reach their audience directly.
Jin ended the session on a positive note: “In virtual reality, you have a lot more bandwidth for empathy. There’s a lot of nuance that is lost in text-based communication platforms. It’s more asynchronous. The sense of presence, of being there with other people, you experience a lot of genuine and good connections… there’s a lot of genuine appreciation of art. That gives me hope.”
The pending sale of Twitter to Elon Musk has generated a buzz about the future of social media and just who should control our data.
Wendy Hanamura, director of partnerships at the Internet Archive, moderated an online discussion April 28 “Goodbye Facebook, Hello Decentralized Social Media?” about the opportunities and dangers ahead. The webinar is part of a series of six workshops, “Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web.”
Watch the session recording:
The session featured founders of some of the top decentralized social media networks including Jay Graber, chief executive officer of R&D project Bluesky, Matthew Hodgson, technical co-founder of Matrix, and Andre Staltz, creator of Manyverse. Unlike Twitter, Facebook or Slack, Matrix and Manyverse have no central controlling entity. Instead the peer-to-peer networks shift power to the users and protect privacy.
If Twitter is indeed bought and people are disappointed with the changes, the speakers expressed hope that the public will consider other social networks. “A crisis of this type means that people start installing Manyverse and other alternatives,” Staltz said. “The opportunity side is clear.” Still in the transition period if other platforms are not ready, there is some risk that users will feel stuck and not switch, he added.
Hodgson said there are reasons to be both optimistic and pessimistic about Musk purchasing Twitter. The hope is that he will use his powers for good, making it available to everybody and empowering people to block the content they don’t want to see. The risk is with no moderation, Hodgson said, people will be obnoxious to one another without sufficient controls to filter, and the system will melt down. “It’s certainly got potential to be an experiment. I’m cautiously optimistic on it,” he said.
People who work in decentralized tech recognize the risk that comes when one person can control a network and act for good or bad, Graber said. “This turn of events demonstrates that social networks that are centralized can change very quickly,” she said. “Those changes can potentially disrupt or drastically alter people’s identity, relationships, and the content that they put on there over the years. This highlights the necessity for transition to a protocol-based ecosystem.”
When a platform is user-controlled, it is resilient to disruptive change, Graber said. Decentralization enables immutability so change is hard and is a slow process that requires a lot of people to agree, added Staltz.
The three leaders spoke about how decentralized networks provide a sustainable alternative and are gaining traction. Unlike major players that own user data and monetize personal information, decentralized networks are controlled by users and information lives in many different places.
“Society as a whole is facing a lot of crises,” Graber said. “We have the ability to, as a collective intelligence, to investigate a lot of directions at once. But we don’t actually have the free ability to fully do this in our current social architecture…if you decentralize, you get the ability to innovate and explore many more directions at once. And all the parts get more freedom and autonomy.”
Decentralized social media is structured to change the balance of power, added Hanamura: “In this moment, we want you to know that you have the power. You can take back the power, but you have to understand it and understand your responsibility.”
At a recent webinar hosted by the Internet Archive, leaders from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) shared how its massive open access digital collection documenting life on the planet is an invaluable resource of use to scientists and ordinary citizens.
“The BHL is a global consortium of the leading natural history museums, botanical gardens, and research institutions — big and small— from all over the world. Working together and in partnership with the Internet Archive, these libraries have digitized more than 60 million pages of scientific literature available to the public”, said Chris Freeland, director of Open Libraries and moderator of the event.
Watch session recording:
Established in 2006 with a commitment to inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge, BHL has 19 members and 22 affiliates, plus 100 worldwide partners contributing data. The BHL has content dating back nearly 600 years alongside current literature that, when liberated from the print page, holds immense promise for advancing science and solving today’s pressing problems of climate change and the loss of biodiversity.
Martin Kalfatovic, BHL program director and associate director of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, noted in his presentation that Charles Darwin and colleagues famously said “the cultivation of natural science cannot be efficiently carried on without reference to an extensive library.”
“Today, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is creating this global, accessible open library of literature that will help scientists, taxonomists, environmentalists—a host of people working with our planet—to actually have ready access to these collections,” Kalfatovic said. BHL’s mission is to improve research methodology by working with its partner libraries and the broader biodiversity and bioinformatics community. Each month, BHL draws about 142,000 visitors and 12 million users overall.
“The outlook for the planet is challenging. By unlocking this historic data [in the Biodiversity Heritage Library], we can find out where we’ve been over time to find out more about where we need to be in the future.”
Martin Kalfatovic, program director, Biodiversity Heritage Library
Most of the BHL’s materials are from collections in the global north, primarily in large, well-funded institutions. Digitizing these collections helps level the playing field, providing researchers in all parts of the world equal access to vital content.
The vast collection includes species descriptions, distribution records, climate records, history of scientific discovery, information on extinct species, and records of scientific distributions of where species live. To date, BHL has made over 176,000 titles and 281,000 volumes available. Through a partnership with the Global Names Architecture project, more than 243 million instances of taxonomic (Latin) names have been found in BHL content.
Kalfatovic underscored the value of BHL content in understanding the environment in the wake of recent troubling news from the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change about the impact of the earth’s warming.
“The outlook for the planet is challenging,” he said. “By unlocking this historic data, we can find out where we’ve been over time to find out more about where we need to be in the future.”
JJ Dearborn, BHL data manager, discussed how digitization transforms physical books into digital objects that can be shared with “anyone, at any time, anywhere.” She describes the Wikimedia ecosystem as “fertile ground for open access experimentation,” crediting the organization with giving BHL the ability to reach new audiences and transform its data into 5-star linked open data. “Dark data” that is locked up in legacy formats, JP2s, and OCR text are sources of valuable checklist, species occurrence, and event sampling data that the larger biodiversity community can use to improve humanity’s collective ability to monitor biodiversity loss and the destructive impacts of climate change, at scale.
The majority of the world’s data today is siloed, unstructured, and unused, Dearborn explained. This “dark data” “represents an untapped resource that could really transform human understanding if it could be truly utilized,” she said. “It might represent a gestalt leap for humanity.”
The event was the fifth in a series of six sessions highlighting how researchers in the humanities use the Internet Archive. The final session of the Library as Laboratory series will be a series of lightning talks on May 11 at 11am PT / 2pm ET—register now!
“How Decentralized Identity Drives Privacy” with Internet Archive, Metro Library Council, and Library Futures
How many passwords do you have saved, and how many of them are controlled by a large, corporate platform instead of by you? Last month’s “Keeping your Personal Data Personal: How Decentralized Identity Drives Privacy” session started with that provocative question in order to illustrate the potential of this emerging technology.
Self-sovereign identity (SSI), defined as “an idea, a movement, and a decentralized approach for establishing trust online,” sits in the middle of the stack of technologies that makes up the decentralized internet. In the words of the Decentralized Identity Resource Guide written specifically for this session, “self-sovereign identity is a system where users themselves–and not centralized platforms or services like Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn–are in control and maintain ownership of their personal information.”
Research shows that the average American has more than 150 different accounts and passwords – a number that has likely skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic. In her presentation, Wendy Hanamura, Director of Partnerships at the Internet Archive, discussed the implications of “trading privacy and security for convenience.” Hanamura drew on her recent experience at SXSW, which bundled her personal data, including medical and vaccine data, into an insecure QR code used by a corporate sponsor to verify her as a participant. In contrast, Hanamura says that the twenty-year old concept of self-sovereign identity can disaggregate these services from corporations, empowering people to be in better control of their own data and identity through principles like control, access, transparency, and consent. While self-sovereign identity presents incredible promise as a concept, it also raises fascinating technical questions around verification and management.
For Kaliya “Identity Woman” Young, her interest in identity comes from networks of global ecology and information technology, which she has been part of for more than twenty years. In 2000, when the Internet was still nascent, she joined with a community to ask: “How can this technology best serve people, organizations, and the planet?” Underlying her work is the strong belief that people should have the right to control their own online identity with the maximum amount of flexibility and access. Using a real life example, Young compared self-sovereign identity to a physical wallet. Like a wallet, self-sovereign identity puts users in control of what they share, and when, with no centralized ability for an issuer to tell when the pieces of information within the wallet is presented.
In contrast, the modern internet operates with a series of centralized identifiers like ICANN or IANA for domain names and IP addresses and corporate private namespaces like Google and Facebook. Young’s research and work decentralizes this way of transmitting information through “signed portable proofs,” which come from a variety of sources rather than one centralized source. These proofs are also called verifiable credentials and have metadata, the claim itself, and a digital signature embedded for validation. All of these pieces come together in a digital wallet, verified by a digital identifier that is unique to a person. Utilizing cryptography, these identifiers would be validated by digital identity documents and registries. In this scenario, organizations like InCommon, an access management service, or even a professional licensing organization like the American Library Association can maintain lists of institutions that would be able to verify the identity or organizational affiliation of an identifier. In the end, Young emphasized a message of empowerment – in her work, self-sovereign identity is about “innovating protocols to represent people in the digital realm in ways that empower them and that they control.”
Next, librarian Lambert Heller of Technische Bibliothek and Irene Adamski of the Berlin-based SSI firm Jolocom discussed and demonstrated their work in creating self-sovereign identity for academic conferences on a new platform called Condidi. This tool allows people running academic events to have a platform that issues digital credentials of attendance in a decentralized system. Utilizing open source and decentralized software, this system minimizes the amount of personal information that attendees need to give over to organizers while still allowing participants to track and log records of their attendance. For libraries, this kind of system is crucial – new systems like Condidi help libraries protect user privacy and open up platform innovation.
Self-sovereign identity also utilizes a new tool called a “smart wallet,” which holds one’s credentials and is controlled by the user. For example, at a conference, a user might want to tell the organizer that she is of age, but not share any other information about herself. A demo of Jolocom’s system demonstrated how this system could work. In the demo, Irene showed how a wallet could allow a person to share just the information she wants through encrypted keys in a conference situation. Jolocom also allows people to verify credentials using an encrypted wallet. According to Adamski, the best part of self sovereign identity is that “you don’t have to share if you don’t want to.” This way, “I am in control of my data.”
To conclude, Heller discussed a recent movement in Europe called “Stop Tracking Science.” To combat publishing oligopolies and data analytics companies, a group of academics have come together to create scholar-led infrastructure. As Heller says, in the current environment, “Your journal is reading you,” which is a terrifying thought about scholarly communications.
These academics are hoping to move toward shared responsibility and open, decentralized infrastructure using the major building blocks that already exist. One example of how academia is already decentralized is through PIDs, or persistent identifiers, which are already widely used through systems like ORCID. According to Heller, these PIDs are “part of the commons” and can be shared in a consistent, open manner across systems, which could be used in a decentralized manner for personal identity rather than a centralized one. To conclude, Heller said, “There is no technical fix for social issues. We need to come up with a model for how trust works in research infrastructure.”
It is clear that self-sovereign identity holds great promise as part of a movement for technology that is privacy-respecting, open, transparent, and empowering. In this future, it will be possible to have a verified identity that is held by you, not by a big corporation – the vision that we are setting out to achieve. Want to help us get there?
The COVID-19 pandemic has been life-changing for people around the globe. As efforts to slow the progress of the virus unfolded in early 2020, librarians, archivists and others with interest in preserving cultural heritage began considering ways to document the personal, societal, and systemic impacts of the global pandemic. These collections included preserving physical, digital and web-based information and artifacts for posterity and future research use.
Clockwise from top left: blog post about local artists making masks from Kansas City Public Library’s “COVID-19 Outbreak” collection; youth vaccination campaign website from American Academy of Pediatrics’ “AAP COVID” collection, COVID-19 case dashboard from Carnegie Mellon University’s “COVID-19” collection and COVID-19 FAQs from Library of Michigan’s “COVID-19 in Michigan” collection.
In response, the Internet Archive’s Archive-It service launched a COVID-19 Web Archiving Special Campaign starting in April 2020 to allow existing Archive-It partners to increase their web archiving capacity or new partners to join to collect COVID-19 related content. In all, more than 100 organizations took advantage of the COVID-19 Web Archiving Special Campaign and more than 200 Archive-It partner organizations built more than 300 new collections specifically about the global pandemic and its effects on their regions, institutions, and local communities. From colleges, universities, and governments documenting their own responses to community-driven initiatives like Sonoma County Library’s Sonoma Responds Community Memory Archive, a variety of information has been preserved and made available. These collections are critical historical records in and of themselves, and when taken in aggregate will allow researchers a comprehensive view into life during the pandemic.
Sonoma County Library’s Sonoma Responds: A Community Memory Archive encouraged community members to contribute content documenting their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We have been exploring with partners ways to provide unified access to hundreds of individual COVID-related web collections created by Archive-It users. When the Institute of Museum and Library Services launched the American Rescue Plan grant program, that was part of the broader American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion stimulus package signed into law on March 11, we applied and were awarded funding to build a COVID-19 Web Archive access portal – a dedicated search and discovery access platform for COVID-19 web collections from hundreds of institutions. The COVID-19 Web Archive will allow for browsing and full text search across diverse institutional collections and enable other access methods, including making datasets and code notebooks available for data analysis of the aggregate collections by scholars. This work will support scholars, public health officials, and the general public in fully understanding the scope and magnitude of our historical moment now and into the future. The COVID-19 Web Archive is unique in that it will provide a unified discovery mechanism to hundreds of aggregated web archive collections built by a diverse group of over 200 libraries from over 40 US states and several other nations, from large research libraries to small public libraries to government agencies. If you would like your Archive-It collection or a portion of it included in the COVID-19 Web Archive, please fill out this interest form by Friday, April 29, 2022. If you are an institution in the United States that has COVID-related web archives collected outside of Archive-It or Internet Archive services that you are interested in having included in the COVID-19 Web Archive, please contact covidwebarchive@archive.org.
In celebration of National Library Week, we’d like to introduce you to some of the professional librarians who work at the Internet Archive and in projects closely associated with our programs. Over the next two weeks, you’ll hear from librarians and other information professionals who are using their education and training in library science and related fields to support the Internet Archive’s patrons.
What draws librarians to work at the Internet Archive? From patron services to collection management to web archiving, the answers are as varied as the departments in which these professionals work. But a common theme emerges from the profiles—that of professionals wanting to use their skills and knowledge in support of the Internet Archive’s mission: “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”
We hope that over these next two weeks you’ll learn something about the librarians working behind the scenes at the Internet Archive, and you’ll come to appreciate the training and dedication that influence their daily work. We’re pleased to help you “Meet the Librarians” during this National Library Week and beyond:
Jessamyn West, accessibility – Vermont Mutual Aid Society
For scholars, especially those in the humanities, the library is their laboratory. Published works and manuscripts are their materials of science. Today, to do meaningful research, that also means having access to modern datasets that facilitate data mining and machine learning.
On March 2, the Internet Archive launched a new series of webinars highlighting its efforts to support data-intensive scholarship and digital humanities projects. The first session focused on the methods and techniques available for analyzing web archives at scale.
Watch the session recording now:
“If we can have collections of cultural materials that are useful in ways that are easy to use — still respectful of rights holders — then we can start to get a bigger idea of what’s going on in the media ecosystem,” said Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle.
Just what can be done with billions of archived web pages? The possibilities are endless.
Jefferson Bailey, Internet Archive’s Director of Web Archiving & Data Services, and Helge Holzmann, Web Data Engineer, shared some of the technical issues libraries should consider and tools available to make large amounts of digital content available to the public.
The Internet Archive gathers information from the web through different methods including global and domain crawling, data partnerships and curation services. It preserves different types of content (text, code, audio-visual) in a variety of formats.
Social scientists, data analysts, historians and literary scholars make requests for data from the web archive for computational use in their research. Institutions use its service to build small and large collections for a range of purposes. Sometimes the projects can be complex and it can be a challenge to wrangle the volume of data, said Bailey.
The Internet Archive has worked on a project reviewing changes to the content of 800,000 corporate home pages since 1996. It has also done data mining for a language analysis that did custom extractions for Icelandic, Norwegian and Irish translation.
Transforming data into useful information requires data engineering. As librarians consider how to respond to inquiries for data, they should look at their tech resources, workflow and capacity. While more complicated to produce, the potential has expanded given the size, scale and longitudinal analysis that can be done.
“We are getting more and more computational use data requests each year,” Bailey said. “If librarians, archivists, cultural heritage custodians haven’t gotten these requests yet, they will be getting them soon.”
Up next in the Library as Laboratory series:
The next webinar in the series will be held March 16, and will highlight five innovative web archiving research projects from the Archives Unleashed Cohort Program. Register now.
As part of our ongoing efforts to archive and provide perpetual access to at-risk, open-access scholarship, we have released Refcat (“reference” + “catalog”), the citation index culled from the catalog that underpins our IA Scholar service for discovering the scholarly literature and research outputs within Internet Archive. This first release of the Refcat dataset contains over 1.3 billion citations extracted from over 60 million metadata records and over 120 million scholarly artifacts (articles, books, datasets, proceedings, code, etc) that IA Scholar has archived through web harvesting, digitization, integrations with other open knowledge services, and through partnerships and joint initiatives.
Refcat represents one of the larger citation graph datasets of scholarly literature, as well as uniquely containing a notable portion of citations from works that do not have a DOI or persistent identifier. We hope this dataset will be a valuable community resource alongside other critical knowledge graph projects, including those with which we are collaborating, such as OpenCitations and Wikicite.
The Refcat dataset is released under a CC0 license and is available for download from archive.org. The related software created for the extraction and matching process, including exact and fuzzy citation matching (refcat and fuzzycat), are also released as open-source tools. For those interested in technical details about the project, a white paper is available on arxiv.org authored by IA engineers, including Martin Czygan, who led work on Refcat, and is described in our catalog user guide.
What does Refcat mean for regular users of IA Scholar? Refcat results from work to ensure the interconnection between material within IA Scholar and other resources archived in Internet Archive in order to make browsing and lookups easier and to ensure overall citation integrity and persistence. For example, there are over 25 million web links in the citations in Refcat and we were able to match ~14 million of these to archived web pages in Wayback Machine and also found that ~18% of these matched web citations are no longer available on the live web. Web links in citations not in Wayback Machine have been added to ongoing web harvests. We also matched over 20 million citations to books that are available for lending in our Open Library service and matched over 1 million citations to Wikipedia entries.
Besides interconnection, Refcat will allow users to understand what works have cited a specific scholarly resource (i.e. “cited by” or “inbound citations”) that will help with improved discovery features. Finally, knowing the full “knowledge graph” of IA Scholar helps us better identify important scholarly material that we have not yet archived, thus improving the overall quality and extent of the collection. This, in turn, aids scholars by ensuring their open-access work is archived and accessible forever, especially for those whose publisher may not have the resources for long-term preservation, and it ensures that related outputs like research registrations or datasets are also archived, matched to the article of record, and available into the future.
The Refcat release is a milestone of Phase Two of our project, “Ensuring the Persistent Access of Long Tail Open Access Journal Literature,” first announced in 2018 and supported by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Current work focuses on citation integrity within the IA Scholar archive, partnerships and services, such as our role in the multi-institutional Project Jasper and our partnership with Center for Open Science, and the addition of secondary scholarly outputs to IA Scholar, including datasets, software, and other non-article/book scholarly materials. Lookout for a plethora of announcements about other IA Scholar milestones in the coming months!
Community Webs, the Internet Archive’s community history web and digital archiving program, is welcoming over 60 new members from across the US, Canada, and internationally. This new cohort is the first expansion of the Community Webs program outside of the United States and we are thrilled to be supporting the development of diverse, community-based web collections on an international scale.
Community Webs empowers cultural heritage organizations to collaborate with their communities to build web and digital archives of primary sources documenting local history and culture, especially collections inclusive of voices typically underrepresented in traditional memory collections. The program achieves this mission by providing its members with free access to the Archive-It web archiving service, digital preservation and digitization services, and technical support and training in topics such as web archiving, community outreach, and digital preservation. The program also offers resources to support a local history archiving community of practice and to facilitate scholarly research.
New Community Webs member Karen Ng, Archivist at Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation), BC, Canada, notes that the program offers a way to capture community-generated online content in a context where many of the Nation’s records are held by other institutions. “The Squamish Nation community is active in creating and documenting language, traditional knowledge, and histories. Now more than ever in the digital age, it is imperative that these stories and histories be captured and stored in accessible ways for future generations.”
Similarly, for Maryna Chernyavska, Archivist at the Kule Folklore Centre in Edmonton, Canada, the program will allow the Centre to continue building relationships with community members and organizations. “Being able to assist local heritage organizations with web archiving will help us empower these communities to preserve their heritage based on their values and priorities, but also according to professional standards.”
The current expansion of the program was made possible in part by generous funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, which supports the growth of Community Webs to new public libraries in the US. Additional funding provided by the Internet Archive allows the program to reach cultural heritage organizations in Canada and beyond. This newest cohort brings the total number of participants in Community Webs to over 150 organizations, a ten-fold increase since the program’s inception in 2017. For a full list of new participants, see below. The program continues to add members – if your institution is interested in joining, please view our open calls for applications and please make your favorite local memory organization aware of the opportunity.
Programming for the new cohort is underway and these members are already diving into the program’s educational resources and familiarizing themselves with the technical aspects of web archiving and digital preservation. We kicked things off recently with introductory Zoom sessions, where participants met one another and shared their organizations’ missions, communities served and goals for membership in the program. Online training modules, developed by staff at the Internet Archive and the Educopia Institute, went live for new members at the beginning of September. And our new cohort joined our existing Community Webs partners at our virtual Partner Meeting on September 22nd.
We are thrilled to see the program continuing to grow and we look forward to working with our newest cohort. A warm welcome to the following new Community Webs members!
Canada:
Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute
Age of Sail Museum and Archives
Ajax Public Library
Blue Mountains Public Library – Craigleith Heritage Depot
Canadian Friends Historical Association
Charlotte County Archives
City of Kawartha Lakes Public Library
Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County
Confluence Concerts | Toronto Performing Arts Archives
Edson and District Historical Society – Galloway Station Museum & Archives
Essex-Kent Mennonite Historical Association
Ex Libris Association
Fishing Lake Métis Settlement Public Library
Frog Lake First Nations Library
Goulbourn Museum
Grimsby Public Library
Hamilton Public Library
Kule Folklore Centre
Maskwacis Cultural College
Meaford Museum
Milton Public Library
Mission Folk Music Festival
Nipissing Nation Kendaaswin
North Lanark Regional Museum
Northern Ontario Railroad Museum and Heritage Centre
Parkwood National Historic Site
Regina Public Library
Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) Archives
Société historique du Madawaska Inc.
St. Clair West Oral History Project
Temagami First Nation Public Library
The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives
The Historical Society of Ottawa
Thunder Bay Museum
Tk’emlups te Secwepemc
International:
Biblioteca Nacional Aruba
Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica (Taiwan)
Mbube Cultural Preservation Foundation (Nigeria)
National Library and Information System Authority (NALIS) (Republic of Trinidad and Tobago)
United States:
Abilene Public Library
Ashland City Library
Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History
Charlotte County Libraries & History
Choctaw Cultural Center
Cultura Local ABI
DC History Center
Forsyth County Public Library
Fort Worth Public Library
Inuit Circumpolar Council – Alaska
Menominee Tribal Archives
Mineral Point Library Archives
Obama Hawaiian Africana Museum
Scott County Library System
South Sioux City Public Library
St. Louis Media History Foundation
Tacoma Public Library
The History Project
The Seattle Public Library
Tipp City Public Library
University of Hawaiʻi – West Oʻahu
Wilmington Public Library District
Congrats to these new partners! We are excited to have you on board.
