Meet the Librarians: Catherine Falls, Community Webs

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To celebrate National Library Week 2022, we are taking readers behind the scenes to Meet the Librarians who work at the Internet Archive and in associated programs.

In the spring of 2021, Catherine Falls was hired by the Internet Archive to launch the Community Webs program in Canada. She was excited about the prospect of helping public libraries, museums, local historical societies and archives digitally preserve important material. 

Catherine Falls

“Most web archiving happens at really large institutions, so much of the experience of local communities is missing from the historic record. It’s giving us a biased view of contemporary society,” Falls said. “The more of these local organizations that we can get to do this archiving, the more the historic record will be brought into balance.”

Since her efforts began, the Internet Archive has partnered with 43 institutions and organizations in Canada to build community-based collections. Falls said it’s been rewarding to follow the growth and variety of web-archiving projects . For example, the Milton Public Library in Ontario is working with the Halton Black History Awareness Society and other organizations to document items that may not otherwise be captured on the web. Meanwhile, the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives is working with its community members to build web archive collections that capture the community’s web presence.

Falls earned  bachelor’s degrees in commerce and art history from the University of British Columbia. She also has a master’s degree in library science and a master’s degree in art history from the University of Toronto. Before coming to the Internet Archive, she worked as an archivist in Canada at several institutions including York University and the Archives of Ontario.

“I’m interested in the free circulation of ideas and the library as a place where public knowledge is accessible.”

Catherine Falls, Community Webs

“I was drawn to libraries as a kind of place that facilitates research–which for me is the most exciting phase of any project,” Falls said. “I’m interested in the free circulation of ideas and the library as a place where public knowledge is accessible. I like how the intellectual possibilities of a library intersect with the library as a community space.”

Catherine Falls

Falls says her background gives her a solid understanding of the basic functions of the library and the common language used within the profession. With that theoretical grounding, she said she can approach her work from a critical perspective to make improvements. 

“It’s important to keep in mind that libraries are not infallible institutions. We need to be constantly questioning our practice and finding ways to be better,” Falls said. “It’s easy to say libraries are these beautiful, idyllic institutions. But I think it’s healthy to take a critical eye toward the work we do so that we can try to live up to our ideals in terms of whose stories we tell, who has access to our services, and what is preserved for the long term.” 

Falls said she enjoys the mission-driven focus of the Internet Archive. Operating in the library, technology and archival world, it has a dynamic, nimble culture that provides fertile ground in which to explore new ideas, she said. 

Falls’ favorite holdings are among some of the quirkier arts-related web archive collections in the Internet Archive: University of Michigan, School of Information, 20th Century Minimalist Music, Dalhousie University, Artist-Run Centres in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Corning Museum of Glass, Contemporary Glass Podcasts.

Meet the Librarians: Jessamyn West, Accessibility

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To celebrate National Library Week 2022, we are taking readers behind the scenes to Meet the Librarians who work at the Internet Archive and in associated programs.

In her work, Jessamyn West is driven by a desire to help people and remove barriers to access.

“When I went to library school, I realized a lot of the things that were important to me lined up with library values,” West said. “Anti-censorship, intellectual freedom, and serving all the people — not just the people who can afford it, not just the people who can make it up two flights of stairs, not just people who can read small print. All the people.”

Jessamyn West

West is living out her values, processing requests from individuals to participate in the Internet Archive’s program for users with print disabilities. She receives emails from people around the world with blindness, low-vision, dyslexia, brain injuries and other cognition problems who need accessible content. In her role, West has helped qualify thousands of patrons to receive materials in alternative digital formats. 

Her qualifying work for the Internet Archive is among a variety of activities that keeps West busy with the Vermont Mutual Aid Society. West works part-time at the Kimball Library in Randolph, Vermont, where she helps adults in her community learn to use technology. She also does public speaking on the digital divide and other technology access issues, as well as writes a monthly column for Computers in Libraries Magazine.

“All I want to do is to get as much knowledge, to the most people, in as easy a way as possible.”

Jessamyn West, Vermont Mutual Aid Society

West grew up in Boxborough, Massachusetts, where she learned about computers from her dad and her mother introduced her to the importance of civic engagement and volunteerism. At Hampshire College, she earned a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and then moved to Seattle.

In 1994, West enrolled in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Washington. The shift to online information and the emergence of the web was presenting an opportunity and a challenge for libraries, which West said was exciting to be a part of at the time.

Jessamyn West

Her first job after graduation in 1996 was with AmeriCorps at the Seattle Public Library helping adults learn to use computers. She later pivoted working for an internet service provider before moving back East. In Vermont, she continued working with libraries and set up her own tech consultancy. West has worked as a tech liaison for Open Library and has been a qualifying authority for the Internet Archive since 2018

“All I want to do is to get as much knowledge, to the most people, in as easy a way as possible,” West said. “I think it’s important that we have all kinds of libraries. I wouldn’t want a world that was only digital libraries and I certainly wouldn’t want a world that was only physical libraries. It’s really nice that many people, depending where you are, can have access to either or both in the way that makes the most sense for them.”

West maintains a professional website (jessamyn.info), a personal website (jessamyn.com) and blogs at librarian.net. When she’s not working, she enjoys editing articles about  librarians and library topics on Wikipedia, playing pub trivia, creating moss terrariums, and writing postcards.

Among West’s favorite items at the Internet Archive: The Middlebury College collection of Vermont Life Magazine and The Great 78 Project.

Meet the Librarians of the Internet Archive

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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.

Jessamyn West
Catherine Falls
Sawood Alam
Lisa Seaberg
Alexis Rossi

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:

Internet Archive Joins Opposition to the “SMART Copyright Act”

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In the past few weeks, governments around the world have renewed their efforts to restrain free expression online. In Canada, a revised “Online Streaming Act” comes as the latest in a long-running attempt to bring streaming under a restrictive regulatory regime. In the UK, a new “Online Safety Bill” seeks to censor “legal but harmful content” in a way that would threaten open digital spaces. And in the USA, content filtering is once again being floated as the answer to online copyright infringement, this time via the “SMART Copyright Act of 2022“.

If the SMART Copyright Act were to pass, the Copyright Office would select a “technical measure” every three years that online service providers would be required to implement. The intent, as supporters have made clear, is for the Copyright Office to mandate technical measures that would automatically “filter out” allegedly infringing material. Lobbyists and lawyers for the owners of these technologies would be allowed to petition the Copyright Office to require the adoption of their own products. Whatever technology is adopted would then have to be purchased and implemented by anyone swept up by the law—from big tech platforms to your local research library. Failure to do so could be punishable by millions of dollars in civil penalties, among other things. As Professor Eric Goldman has written:

The SMART Copyright Act is a thinly veiled proxy war over mandatory filtering of copyrighted works. . . mandatory filters are error-prone in ways that hurt consumers, and they raise entry barriers in ways that reduce competition.

More generally, the SMART Copyright Act would give the Copyright Office a truly extraordinary power–the ability to force thousands of businesses to adopt, at their expense, technology they don’t want and may not need, and the mandated technologies could reshape how the Internet works.

Wouldn’t It Be Great if Internet Services Had to License Technologies Selected by Hollywood? (Comments on the Very Dumb “SMART Copyright Act”), from Eric Goldman’s Technology & Marketing Law Blog on March 23, 2022

This bill and its supporters do not represent the public’s interest in fair copyright policy and a robust and accessible public domain. That is a shame, because much good could be done if policymakers would put the public’s interest first. For example, the Copyright Office—which holds records of every copyright ever registered, including all those works which have passed into the public domain—could help catalogue the public domain and prevent it from being swept up by today’s already-overzealous automated filtering technologies (an idea inspired by this white paper from Paul Keller and Felix Reda). Instead, the public domain continues to be treated as acceptable collateral damage in the quest to impose ever-greater restrictions on free expression online.

It is no surprise that the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the Library Copyright Alliance, and many others have voiced criticism of this harmful bill. Today, Internet Archive joins these and other signatories in a joint letter to the bill’s cosponsors, Senators Tillis and Leahy, expressing opposition and concern. You can read the letter here.

Ukrainian Book Drive: Please Contribute

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(CC photo credit)

The Internet Archive is requesting donations of Ukrainian books and books useful to Ukrainians. The books will be preserved, digitized and lent (for free to one user at a time) over the Internet. The Internet Archive is prioritizing the digitization and hosting of relevant materials for Ukrainians.

Already the University of Toronto and University of Alberta has sponsored the digitization of sizable Ukrainian collections, where the total collections on archive.org total over 8,000 items in Ukrainian.

But we need much more to support Ukrainians, many of whom are displaced and do not have access to their schools and libraries.

We need your help.  Together we can preserve all published works and make them as widely available as we can.  

The Internet Archive provides free downloading of public domain materials, services for those with print disabilities, free Controlled Digital Lending of books, free interlibrary loan services, free hosting for materials that are uploaded to archive.org, and supports web archiving efforts.  These services can be more relevant to Ukrainians with your help.

Please donate physical books and other materials, upload relevant materials to archive.org, and also consider financial support for our activities.  

Mission Impossible: The Compuserve Chapter

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There are parts of technology history (frankly, any history) that are thought to be critical to telling the story, and utterly lost. Pieces and fragments will rise up out of the darkness, but a cohesive collection of what once made up a chapter will be thought gone forever.

Sadly, this happens a lot.

But in one special exception, the Computer History Museum found itself with an opportunity to seize the moment.

Compuserve is considered to be the first major online service in the United States. Founded in the era of “time-sharing” services (paying to use a computer during the main owner’s quiet hours), this subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance moved from 1969 to 1979 in the kind of obscurity befitting a simple business-to-business service providing access to PDP mainframes.

This all changed in 1979 with the rebranding of Compuserve Information Service (CIS), which marketed itself to mainstream computer users, providing chat, games, and storehouses of information for an hourly fee to who ever could afford the phone bills and equipment to do so. It is here that Compuserve (and later services like The Source, America On-Line and Prodigy) brought a bulk of folks online for the first time.

Book page image
Catalog of Compuserve Games, 1984.

This service flourished through the 1980s and 1990s, and in what should be considered a reductive and surface description of the situation, slowly broke apart via acquisitions, shifting priorities and the dominance of the World Wide Web providing many aspects of what Compuserve had previously done exclusively.

By the time this 2000s-era chapter was over, Compuserve was more a brand and a memory. But it had still reigned in the minds of many as the beginning, the launching pad for a lot of what people came to expect the online world to provide.

It was assumed most of the history of Compuserve was gone – the hardware, software and documentation scattered to the winds.

Not so.

As explained in this blog entry that literally reads like a movie script, the Computer History Museum has acquired, sorted, and added a major amount of Compuserve’s archives to their stacks. The collection had been sitting for decades, and was soon to be disposed of, when it was offered to CHM and they accepted.

Among these items that have been recovered are documents that are being given to the Internet Archive to scan and place online – instructions on how to operate a Compuserve service.

These opportunities to recover assumed-lost materials are extremely rare, but hope springs eternal that in rooms, attics and file cabinets around the world, there possibly lurk further discoveries, and happy endings. Almost like a movie.

Join us April 5 for WHOLE EARTH: A Conversation with John Markoff

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Join us on Tuesday, April 5 at 11am PT / 2pm ET for a book talk with John Markoff in conversation with journalist Steven Levy (Facebook: The Inside Story), on the occasion of Markoff’s new biography, WHOLE EARTH: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand.

Watch the session recording now:

For decades Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter John Markoff has chronicled how technology has shaped our society. In his latest book, WHOLE EARTH: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (on-sale now), Markoff delivers the definitive biography of one of the most influential visionaries to inspire the technological, environmental, and cultural revolutions of the last six decades.

Purchase your copy today

Today Stewart Brand is largely known as the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of tools, books, and other intriguing ephemera that became a counterculture bible for a generation of young Americans during the 1960s. He was labeled a “techno-utopian” and a “hippie prince”, but Markoff’s WHOLE EARTH shows that Brand’s life’s work is far more. In 1966, Brand asked a simple question—why we had not yet seen a photograph of the whole earth? The whole earth image became an optimistic symbol for environmentalists and replaced the 1950s’ mushroom cloud with the ideal of a unified planetary consciousness. But after the catalog, Brand went on to greatly influence the ‘70s environmental movement and the computing world of the ‘80s. Steve Jobs adopted Brand’s famous mantra, “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” as his code to live by, and to this day Brand epitomizes what Markoff calls “that California state of mind.”

Watch now

Brand has always had an “eerie knack for showing up first at the onset of some social movement or technological inflection point,” Markoff writes, “and then moving on just when everyone else catches up.” Brand’s uncanny ahead-of-the-curveness is what makes John Markoff his ideal biographer. Markoff has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, and his reporting has always been at the cutting edge of tech revolutions—he wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993 and broke the story of Google’s self-driving car in 2010. Stewart Brand gave Markoff carte blanche access in interviews for the book, so Markoff gets a clearer story than has ever been set down before, ranging across Brand’s time with the Merry Pranksters and his generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog, to his fostering of the marriage of environmental consciousness with hacker capitalism and the rise of a new planetary culture.

Above all, John Markoff’s WHOLE EARTH reminds us how today, amid the growing backlash against Big Tech, Stewart Brand’s original technological optimism might offer a roadmap for Silicon Valley to find its way back to its early, most promising vision.

Purchase your copy of WHOLE EARTH: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand via the Booksmith, our local bookstore.

EVENT DETAILS
WHOLE EARTH: A conversation with John Markoff
April 5 @ 11am PT / 2pm ET
Watch the event recording

Volunteers Rally to Archive Ukrainian Web Sites

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As the war intensifies in Ukraine, volunteers from around the world are working to archive digital content at risk of destruction or manipulation. The Internet Archive is supporting several preservation efforts including the Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) initiative launched in early March. 

“When we think about the internet, we think the data is always going to be there. But all this data exists on physical servers and they can get destroyed just like buildings and monuments,” said Quinn Dombrowski, academic technology specialist at Stanford University and co-founder of SUCHO. “A tremendous amount of effort and energy has gone into the development of these websites and digitized collections. The people of Ukraine put them together for a reason. They wanted to share their history, culture, language and literature with the world.”

Watch:

More than 1,200 volunteers with SUCHO have saved 10 terabytes of data including 14,000 uploaded items (images and PDFs) and captured parts of 2,300 websites so far. This includes material from Ukrainian museums, library websites, digital exhibits, open access publications and elsewhere. 

The initiative is using a combination of technologies to crawl and archive sites and content. Some of the information is stored at the Internet Archive, where it can be discovered and accessed using open-source software.

Staff at the Internet Archive are committed to assisting with the effort, which aligns with the organization’s mission of universal access to knowledge, and aim to make the web more useful and reliable, said Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine.

“This is a pivotal time in history,” he said. “We’re seeing major powers engaged in a war and it’s happening in the internet age where the platforms for information sharing and access we have built, and rely on, the Internet and the Web, are at risk.”

The Internet Archive is documenting and making information accessible that might not otherwise be available, Graham said. For years, the Wayback Machine has been archiving about 950 Russian news sites and 350 Ukrainian news sites. Stories that are deleted or altered are being archived for the historical record. 

“We’re seeing major powers engaged in a war and it’s happening in the internet age where the platforms for information sharing and access…are at risk.”

Mark Graham, director, Wayback Machine

Recognizing the urgency of this moment, Dombrowski has been stunned by the response to help from archivists, scholars, librarians involved in cultural heritage and the general public. Volunteers need not have technical expertise or special language skills to be of value in the project. 

“Many people were spending the days before they got involved with SUCHO scrolling the news and feeling helpless and wishing they could do something to contribute more directly towards helping out with the situation,” Dombrowski said. “It’s been really inspiring hearing the stories that people have told about what it’s meant to them to be able to be part of something like this.”

Gudrun Wirtz, head of the East European Department of the Bavarian State Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) in Munich, was archiving on a smaller scale when she and other colleagues began to collaborate with SUCHO.

“We are committed to Ukraine’s heritage and horrified by this war against the people and their rich culture and the distorting of history going on,” Wirtz said. “As Germans we are especially shocked and reminded of our historical responsibility, because last time Ukraine was invaded it was 1941 by Nazi-Germany. We try to do everything we can at the moment.”

Anna Kiljas, Tufts University

The invasion of Ukraine hits particularly close to home for Anna Kijas, a librarian at Tufts University and co-founder of SUCHO, who is a Polish immigrant with family members who lived through Soviet occupation following WWII.

“Contributing to the SUCHO effort is something tangible that I can do and bring my expertise as a librarian and digital humanist in order to help preserve as much of the cultural heritage of the Ukrainian people as is possible,” said Kijas. 

The third co-founder SUCHO, Sebastian Majstorovic, is with the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage. 

The Internet Archive is providing technical support, tools and training to assist volunteers, including those with SUCHO, who are giving of their time.

Through Archive-It, a customizable self-service web archiving platform that captures, stores, and provides access to web-based content, free online accounts have been offered to volunteer archivists. Mirage Berry, business development manager for Archive-It, has coordinated support with other preservation partners including the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, and East European & Central Asian Studies Collections librarian Liladhar Pendse at University of California, Berkeley.

“It’s so incredible how quickly all of these archivists have pulled together to do this,” Berry said. “Everyone wants to do something. You don’t need to have a ton of technical experience. For anyone who is willing to learn, it’s a great jumping off point for web archiving.”

SUCHO organizers anticipate after the immediate emergency of website archiving is over, there will be an ongoing need to stay vigilant with data curation of Ukrainian material. To learn more and get involved, visit http://www.sucho.org.

Library as Laboratory Recap: Applications of Web Archive Research with the Archive Unleashed Cohort Program

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From projects that compare public health misinformation to feminist media tactics, the Internet Archive is providing researchers with vital data to assist them with archival web collection analysis.

In the second of a series of webinars highlighting how the Internet Archive supports digital humanities research, five scholars shared their experience with the Archives Unleashed Project on March 16. 

Archives Unleashed was established in 2017 with funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The team developed open-source, user-friendly Archives Research Compute Hub (ARCH) tools to allow researchers to conduct scalable analyses, as well as resources and tutorials. An effort to build and engage a community of users led to a partnership with the Internet Archive. 

A cohort program was launched in 2020 to provide researchers with mentoring and technical expertise to conduct analyses of archival web material on a variety of topics. The webinar speakers provided an overview of their innovative projects: 

  • WATCH: Crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic was the focus of an investigation by Tim Ribaric and researchers at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. Using fully extracted texts from websites of municipal governments, community organizations and others, the team compared how well information was conveyed to the public. The analysis assessed four facets of communication: resilience, education, trust and engagement. The data set was used to teach senior communication students at the university about digital scholarship, Ribaric said, and the team is now finalizing a manuscript with the results of the analysis.
  • WATCH: Shana MacDonald from the University of Waterloo in Ontario Canada applied archival web data to do a comparative analysis of feminist media tactics over time. The project mapped the presence of feminist key concepts and terms to better understand who is using them and why. The researchers worked with the Archives Unleashed team to capture information from relevant websites, write code and analyze the data. They found the top three terms used were “media, culture and community,” MacDonald said, providing an interesting snapshot into trends with language and feminism.
  • WATCH: At the University of Siegen, a public research university in Germany, researchers examined the online commenting system on new websites from 1996 to 2021.  Online media outlets started to remove commenting systems in about 2015 and the project was focused on this time of disruption. With the rise of Web 2.0 and social media, commenting is becoming increasingly toxic and taking away from the main text, said the university’s Robert Jansma. Technology providers have begun to offer ways to stem the tide of these unwanted comments and, in general, the team discovered comments are not very well preserved.
  • WATCH: Web archives of the COVID-19 crisis through the IIPC Novel Coronavirus dataset was analyzed by a team at the University of Luxembourg led by Valérie Schafer. As a shared, unforeseen, global event, the researchers found vast institutional differences in web archiving. Looking at tracking systems from the U.S. Library of Congress, European libraries and others, the team did not see much overlap in national collections and are in the midst of finalizing the project’s results.
  • WATCH: Researchers at Arizona State University worked with ARCH tools to compare health misinformation circulating during the HIV/AIDS crisis and COVID-19 pandemic.  ASU’s Shawn Walker did a text analysis to link patterns and examine how gaps in understanding of health crises can fuel misinformation. In both cases, the community was trying to make sense of information in an uncertain environment. However, the government conspiracy theories rampant in the COVID-19 pandemic were not part of the dialogue during the HIV/AIDS crisis, Walker said.

Archives Unleashed is accepting applications for its 2022-23 cohort research teams. For more information, view the application & instructions: https://archivesunleashed.org/cohorts2022-2023/.

Up next in the Library as Laboratory series:

The next webinar in the series, Hundreds of Books, Thousands of Stories: A Guide to the Internet Archive’s African Folktales will be held March 30. Register now

Integrating Web-Based Content into a Vibrant Local History Collection: South Pasadena Public Library and the Community Webs Program

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Guest post by: Olivia Radbill, Adult Services/Local History Librarian, South Pasadena Public Library

This post is part of a series written by members of Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. Community Webs advances the capacity for community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories and underrepresented voices. For more information, visit communitywebs.archive-it.org/

The South Pasadena Public Library (SPPL) is a single branch library system located in the small city of South Pasadena, California, just fifteen minutes from downtown Los Angeles. SPPL serves a population of approximately 25,000 residents, many of whom are very dedicated to preservation and local history. As the Adult Services/Local History Librarian at SPPL, I regularly interact with local organizations, City staff, City commissioners, and residents in search of the many little-known details of South Pasadena’s history. My role not only entails organizing, processing, and making accessible local history, but also archiving current events that will inevitably be the subject of future research. 

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the SPPL building was first shut down and our physical Local History Collection made inaccessible, Library staff sought to provide means of bringing local history to digital platforms in a consistent and manageable way. Our first means of public outreach was through the creation of digital exhibits using ArcGIS Storymaps, an interactive web-mapping tool used to host narrative multimedia displays. Exhibits in the series include Ray Bradbury: Celebrating 100 Years, South Pasadena Public Library: Twelve Decades and Counting, City of Trees: Our Urban Tree Canopy, Summers in SoPas: Highlights of Summers Past, and COVID-19: Living History Project. To date, this series has garnered thousands of views.

Screenshot of “Summers in SoPas: Highlights of Summers Past” online exhibit.

While this series did quell some of the community desire to interact with the Local History Collection, it did not address the needs of the community in regards to born-digital content. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted certain gaps in our collection. One of the most notable gaps was the lack of any born-digital or web-archived content. Previously, SPPL has relied primarily on physical donations and physical City documentation. However, once these objects became inaccessible to both Library staff and patrons during our initial COVID-19 closure in March 2020, we sought means of preserving documentation that has increasingly moved to exclusively web-based platforms. For example, in April 2020 the City of South Pasadena launched “City Hall Scoop”, an online blog intended to provide quick, reliable news updates to local residents. It became imperative for Library staff to actively seek out and ensure preservation of this kind of content. 

The South Pasadena Public Library homepage on Archive-It.

At the onset of our involvement in the Community Webs program, I strove to ensure that the objective of our internet archiving was specific, consistent, and attainable. After careful consideration, the following categories were determined to be priorities to the SPPL Local History Collection: City Government, Local Newspapers, and Nonprofit Organizations. Based on these categories we have identified many relevant websites, but chose to focus primarily on official websites and social media pages, to add to the Archive-It platform. The Community Webs project has been an invaluable resource for addressing the needs of both the SPPL staff and the community. Online trainings have aided significantly in overcoming learning curves, helped us determine the scope of our archiving project, and have allowed SPPL to create a system in which web-based content is an integral part of our Local History Collection. SPPL, as of March 2022, has archived, either singularly or on a recurring basis, eleven websites. We are hoping to archive 22 new sites by the end of the year, doubling the number we reached last year.