On June 17, 2026, the Internet Archive hosted the National Summit on Local News Preservation in National Harbor, Maryland. Organized through our Today’s News for Tomorrow (TNT) program with partners the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), and with support from Press Forward and the Society of American Archivists Foundation, the Summit brought journalists, librarians, archivists, and researchers into the same room. At the event, attendees worked together to develop recommendations for newsrooms and cultural heritage organizations and to lay out next steps for preserving local news on a national and local level.
The TNT Project Team has released a report documenting the proceedings of the Summit and offering recommendations. The report also provides an analysis of breakout group discussions and identifies areas for future action.
As the report makes clear, a single convening is not enough to ensure that local news continues to be preserved and accessible. The Summit, and this resulting report, should be seen as a first step. We invite you to read the report, share it with colleagues, and join us in the work to preserve local news.
Artists today use their websites as more than a business card– they are an online portfolio, CV, document of artistic evolution, and works of art in their own right. They are valuable records of a life’s work, yet as with all technology, they are fragile and ephemeral. They can vanish overnight due to expiring domain registrations, server migrations, software obsolescence, or administrative access loss after the passing of an artist.
Art historians, critics, curators, and humanities scholars rely on artists’ records to understand and contextualize contemporary artistic practice. To support the accessibility and discoverability of these websites for art historical scholarship in the future, the Internet Archive’s Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA) program is working to preserve artists’ websites, ensuring that they endure as documents of an artist’s legacy. Earlier this year, CARTA led an initiative to expand the Artists’ Websites collection and to preserve underrepresented voices of artists that are at risk of disappearing from the digital cultural record. Through extensive outreach to artists and arts organizations, CARTA invited the public to nominate websites to grow the collection, including encouraging artists to submit their own websites for preservation.
CARTA brings together art libraries, museums, and organizations from across the United States and Canada in partnership with the Internet Archive to preserve online art materials and make them permanently accessible to everyone. After an art resource is nominated by a CARTA member, web archivists take an interactive snapshot of the website to ensure the site is available in the future as it appeared on the day it was preserved.
The librarians and archivists in the CARTA program have been championing access and preservation of artists’ websites since 2018. Members from Atlanta, Georgia to Vancouver, British Columbia have been nominating and curating websites of local artists and arts organizations that represent their diverse communities. The Getty Research Institute, for instance, nominates websites of Southern California artists and art organizations like the website of Ricardo Valverde, a Chicano photographer specializing in street photography and portraiture. He dedicated himself to photographing people, places, and events in East Los Angeles, offering a powerful counternarrative of his community and its inhabitants. In DC, the National Gallery of Art prioritizes Black artists like Tim Davis, a mixed-media painter working primarily with narratives of social justice, activism, identity, and the Black experience.
Tim Davis, Together As One, Silkscreen print, 2017
The recent public nomination call built on this longstanding preservation work by inviting artists and art organizations to contribute to the archive, and the response demonstrated just how meaningful this is for artists. One artist who submitted a website for preservation shared: “I fear this website was built long ago and may soon be nonfunctional.”
Another referenced a former technological loss: “We had a website melt down some years ago and lost everything.”
Another artist shared the personal significance of the call to archive: “This could not come at a better time as I start to work on my artist legacy and I’m thinking of ways that my website can live on once I pass and won’t be able to pay the fees after a while. My website is an extremely important tool that I have used since 2005 when it was uploaded. It is a tool that I use daily and share with others, and helps me track my works, my exhibition history, my entire art career. As a mid-career LatinX artist and under represented, […] it will give me peace of mind that future generations could find my work as I designed and intend the public to view it.”
Over 50 websites were selected for preservation from this public nomination process and will be archived in the upcoming weeks. Of the sites that were reviewed and recommended by CARTA’s Collection Development Committee members, many websites of Latinx artists were prioritized, showcasing the importance of preservation of these voices and artworks for the art historical record. Below are some examples from the selected websites; all websites will be accessible on https://carta.archive-it.org/ later this year.
Bibiana Suárez is a Puerto Rican artist and art educator. Her website showcases her bright graphic work that explores topics such as cock fighting, colorism, and food cultures within Puerto Rican history. The nominator added, “her work should be preserved because she asks the hard-hitting questions that allow people to take apart what creates struggles within the Puerto Rican Diaspora.”
Bibiana Suárez, (left) El niño Atocha con dálmatas / Little Jesus with Dalmatians & (right) Jackie, digital print on paper, 1997-1998
On her website, Suárez shares that her work is a reflection on her experience of acculturation after living in the US for nearly as long as she’s lived in Puerto Rico. She writes, “[w]hile I may acculturate, I resist assimilation,” a theme that is expressed throughout her work.
Another selected artist, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, has been exhibiting her work since the 1980s, choosing to focus on fiber arts at a time when weaving was considered “craft,” not “art.” As the daughter of a Huichol-descended father who weaved and a Mexican-American mother who embroidered, it has always been important to the artist to continue these ancestral practices and insist on their legitimacy in the world of “fine arts.” From the nominator: “Her work brings visibility to the fiber art field and reflects the experience of women, of the Latinx community, and the US/Mexico border as place.”
Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, wall installation from The Armory Show with Ruiz-Healy Art, New York, NY, 2023
Artists will continue to use the internet to create, document, and engage with their artistic practice. Websites like these document decades of an artist’s work and are essential parts of an artist’s legacy. When they disappear, we lose invaluable documentation of an artist’s career and evidence of their larger impact. Preserving these websites has become an important part of preserving art history now and CARTA is spearheading this coordinated effort to ensure these websites are available in the future.
To learn more about CARTA and the artists’ websites that are preserved in the collections, visit https://carta.archive-it.org/.
The Internet Archive has cultivated thousands of planned giving supporters over the years who have decided when making their legacy plans to include the Internet Archive in them as a nonprofit of choice. Tim, who turned 40, made that decision and decided it was time to think about the organizations that reflect what matters most to him and how he could help sustain their work.
He named the Internet Archive as one of his primary beneficiaries, making him a member of the Internet Archive Legacy Circle.
Growing Up Alongside the Internet
Tim grew up alongside the early internet. He built homepages, joined web rings, learned HTML, and eventually turned that early curiosity into a career working with Linux and open-source technology. “The internet, for me, is like a forest that I’ve grown up in, and I’ve seen change over time.”
Today, the Wayback Machine allows Tim to revisit some of the websites, blogs, and projects he created when he was younger. He also helps preserve the web by running Archive Warrior projects on his own server and regularly uses the Live Music Archive.
Tim, Internet Archive Legacy Circle Member and Monthly Giving Circle Member
Sharing Knowledge With Others
Throughout his career, Tim has often been the person on his team who documents how systems work and shares that information freely with others.
He even wrote a technical book,The Linux Sysadmins Guide to Virtual Disks, to provide the clear, practical guidance he felt was missing. By uploading the book to the Internet Archive, Tim has helped ensure that it remains freely available to anyone who may find it useful.
Tim also recently created famoe.ly, a project that uses the Live Music Archive’s API to analyze concert set lists and help listeners discover recordings.
Giving for Today and Tomorrow
For Tim, planning for the future also inspired him to give today. In addition to including the Internet Archive in his plans, he recently began making a monthly donation. “No reason I can’t start helping while I’m still here.”
Perhaps the most meaningful part of the experience was the peace of mind that came from putting his wishes in place. Tim shared that he now feels less worried after he is gone and less pressure to accomplish everything right now. “I know that if I can’t make the impact I want to while I’m here, I have left a meaningful contribution behind to organizations that are deeply important to me.”
Start Building Your Legacy
Tim’s story is a wonderful reminder that planned giving is not only something to consider later in life. It can begin at any age, with a simple decision about what matters to you, what you can do today, and what you hope will continue far into the future.
The Internet Archive’s estate planning program was established to provide an option for patrons who wanted to leave a legacy by donating assets and investments. Over the next decade, two to three trillion dollars of estate assets will transfer from Baby Boomers. Nonprofits have a lot to gain from such a wealth transfer. Therefore, a planned giving program was launched at the Internet Archive in 2022 to leverage this immense giving opportunity.
In 2026, Joy Chesbrough, the Head of Philanthropy who launched the program, decided to hire Janet Glaze to build on the accelerated growth and momentum. “Making patrons and supporters the center of our work is extremely important. Planned giving is an important cornerstone in philanthropy, and a strategic opportunity to establish long-term loyalty with our most trusted supporters”, commented Chesbrough. “I am confident that Janet Glaze will do a great job establishing new opportunities for Legacy Circle members.” By joining the Legacy Circle, supporters become part of a community committed to protecting knowledge and ensuring it remains accessible for generations to come.
If you have already included the Internet Archive in your estate plans, or are considering doing so, we would be grateful to hear from you. Sharing your intentions takes only a minute, and there is no obligation.
Please contact Janet Glaze, the Internet Archive’s Planned Giving Regional Officer if you are interested in leaving a legacy gift. If you have questions or would like to talk through your options, please fill out our Legacy Circle form, email donations@archive.org or leave a message for the Philanthropy Department at 415-561-6767.
We couldn’t do this work without your generosity. Thank you for helping preserve knowledge for generations to come.
Janet Glaze, Planned Giving Regional Officer Internet Archive Philanthropy
Preserving humanity’s memory isn’t cheap. Servers need power, storage needs upgrading, and physical collections need scanning teams working around the clock. Leading a philanthropy department and building a high-performing team to fund these projects and meet that challenge is no small task. Since leading this department, we have grown our fundraising by 350%, guided by a commitment to nonprofit best practices and sustainable, donor-centered growth. Over time, that discipline has paid off: a loyal community of supporters emerged, expanding our fundraising base to hundreds of thousands of donors worldwide. That growth prompted the launch of a new fundraising strategy in partnership with GoFundMe, one designed to leverage crowdfunding fundraising tools and build a community of supporters who could engage firsthand with our work and see, up close, how our programs come to life. In 2025, that strategy took shape as a full-scale platform launch that has become a strategic funding and effective tool for turning individual passion into institutional impact.
The 2025 Launch: A New Way to Give
Rather than betting on a single approach, there has been a focus in philanthropy to diversify fundraising, and it’s resulted in establishing nine funding channels, including estate planning, workplace and monthly giving, institutional and transformational giving and crowdfunding. The GoFundMe Pro crowdfunding rollout was created to increase engagement, loyalty and long-term impact. Embedded with a/b testing and key peer-to-peer strategies, it resulted in prompting people to give. Traditional, centralized fundraising ran alongside peer-to-peer (P2P) campaigns, where individual supporters created their own fundraising pages to rally friends, family, and online communities around what they cared about. It became a grassroots effort where supporters could create personalized campaigns to raise funds for Archive projects that mattered most to them.
The centerpiece of last year’s fundraising effort was an event celebration on October 22, 2025. The Internet Archive celebrated an extraordinary milestone of reaching one trillion web pages preserved and accessible on the Wayback Machine. This prompted the creation of a cross-departmental collaboration to launch a GoFundMe campaign with our community and celebrate the achievement. It was evident that the fundraising campaign would be a huge success due to all the great work that went into engaging our loyal funders and the work of the teams who captured and preserved one trillion web pages. The Web We Built campaign was paired directly with a P2P fundraising push, inviting supporters to help preserve the next one trillion web pages.
To sweeten the deal, a generous foundation was asked to layer in $1 million in matching funds to stretch every dollar further. Through the campaign window, every dollar raised through The Web We’ve Built P2P campaign was matched 2:1, tripling the impact of each donation, and supporters had until the end of 2025 to help the campaign reach its $1 million match goal. For a $500 donor, that meant their gift effectively became $1500 for the Archive’s ongoing work. This was a simple, tangible incentive that turned casual supporters into active fundraisers running their own campaigns on our behalf.
The result was hundreds of thousands of dollars raised through a combination of milestone storytelling, grassroots P2P energy, and matched giving, all proof that the GoFundMe crowdfunding platform could do more than collect donations. It could turn a technical achievement (one trillion archived pages) into a shared community celebration people wanted to be part of.
2026: Saving Our Vanishing Cultures
Building on that momentum, 2026 brought a sharper, more emotional focus: Saving Our Vanishing Cultures, a campaign built around four collections that would have been lost forever without the efforts of the Internet Archive’s scanning teams. Where the 2025 campaign celebrated scale, this one told stories about specific communities, specific histories, and the very real risk of culture and its stories and artifacts disappearing without a trace.
The campaign echoes a broader concern the Internet Archive has been raising through its Vanishing Culture initiative, one that corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyberattacks are increasingly threatening public access to shared cultural history. Because web pages are ephemeral and link-rot is so prevalent, it means that information online can disappear at any time. This highlights the importance of how fragile digital culture can be when it isn’t actively preserved. It’s also important to note that the four collections featured in this year’s GoFundMe campaign were chosen because each one represents a story of culture nearly lost, and a team that refused to let that happen. The four featured collections in the 2026 campaign gave donors a concrete way to fight back against that fragility and capture the spirit of the effort, while supporting its achievements.
Backing Up an Entire Island: Colección Aruba
Of the four collections featured in the Saving Our Vanishing Cultures GoFundMe campaign, the partnership with Aruba stood out as the campaign’s heart. In 2024, the Internet Archive officially partnered with the country of Aruba to digitize and preserve the nation’s complete history, working alongside Aruban officials, the National Library, and the National Archive. The effort, launched as Colección Aruba, digitized roughly 100,000 items of the island nation’s cultural heritage and made them freely available to the public, an achievement that brought together unified support from Aruba’s Prime Minister, Minister of Culture, and Minister of Education, a level of governmental buy-in we had rarely seen.
Aruba’s National Librarian, Astrid Britten (left),signs the Four Rights, alongside National Archivist, Raymond Hernandez (middle), and Brewster Kahle (right), Internet Archive founder and digital librarian.
The moment captured in that photo says as much as any statistic could. This wasn’t a quiet backend migration, but it was a public, ceremonial commitment from a nation’s top cultural stewards, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Archive to put preservation principles into writing.
The partnership was significant enough that Aruba received the Internet Archive’s Hero Award, an honor given annually to individuals, organizations, or nations that show exceptional leadership in expanding access to knowledge and supporting digital preservation, joining past honorees like the Biodiversity Heritage Library and public access advocate Carl Malamud.
The collection’s impact has only grown since. Materials documenting the history of slavery in Aruba have since been designated part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register, which is a global recognition that these records now stand alongside some of humanity’s most significant documentary heritage. It’s a powerful reminder of why digitization matters: these documents aren’t just preserved, they’re now protected on the world stage, ensuring future generations can learn from them regardless of what happens to the physical originals.
Aruba also made history in another way by becoming the first country to formally sign onto the Four Digital Rights of Memory Institutions:
The right to collect
The right to preserve
The right to provide access
The right to interlibrary collaboration
These four rights have since become a rallying point for libraries and archives worldwide, and Aruba’s early commitment gave the framework real-world legitimacy right out of the gate. You can explore the full collection yourself at archive.org/details/aruba.
Why GoFundMe, and Why It Worked
It’s worth pausing on why the platform choice mattered. GoFundMe Pro brought the philanthropy department access to a giving community of people worldwide, along with donor protections like the GoFundMe Giving Guarantee and dedicated customer support infrastructure most nonprofits can’t build on their own. Through GoFundMe Pro, our team also gained fundraising software built specifically for nonprofit scale, rather than adapting consumer tools to institutional needs.
The goal leading philanthropy was never just to raise money faster, but to give supporters a real seat at the table, where they could see exactly how their generosity turned Archive projects into preserved history.
Infrastructure alone doesn’t raise money, but championing the stories of our loyal supporters does. The most successful campaigns, from the one trillion web pages milestone to the vanishing culture collections worked because they gave donors something they could connect with emotionally: a scanning team racing against time, a nation’s slavery records finally getting global recognition, a culture’s historical record that almost vanished but didn’t. That’s the throughline connecting both campaigns. Numbers get attention, but stories and impact get donations.
What’s Next
Between the 2025 one trillion web pages milestone celebration and the 2026 Vanishing Culture campaign, we’ve proven that fundraising strategy can evolve without losing sight of mission. Crowdfunding campaigns turn supporters into advocates. Matching funds make small gifts feel bigger. Focused storytelling, like Colección Aruba, transforms an abstract preservation mission into something people can see, touch, and champion.
Philanthropy is more than a revenue stream. It is the clearest signal that our mission resonates, and it is what allows us to grow our base of support even as needs evolve. Every gift represents someone choosing to believe in the work of preserving culture and knowledge for future generations. Cultivating that belief, and giving it new ways to express itself, is core to sustaining and growing support over time.
Digital donor engagement should be a fixture of every philanthropy team’s playbook, not a periodic experiment. Donor expectations are shifting quickly, and organizations that keep innovating in how they connect, involve, and steward supporters will be the ones that earn lasting loyalty.
Looking ahead, I’m focused on the next chapter, one that builds on this same foundation: meeting donors where they are, and giving them real ownership over the projects they want to help digitize and preserve. That means continuing to think outside the box, finding new digital channels and storytelling formats to bring our work to life, and building genuine communities around it. Bringing supporters inside the Internet Archive to experience our projects firsthand, and see their impact directly, will be central to how we grow support going forward.
If the last two years are any indication, our next fundraising campaign won’t just ask for donations. It will ask people to help save something that matters to them specifically, and give them the tools to bring others along.
Joy Chesbrough, Chief Philanthropy Officer at Internet Archive
Joy leads the Internet Archive’s philanthropy department and philanthropy team.She has been managing the department and its fundraising strategy for the past seven years. If you would like to reach out to Joy, please email her at joy@archive.org.
Local news is disappearing. Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers. 213 counties have no local news outlet at all and another 1,524 have just one. Newsrooms continue to shrink, close, and merge, often with no plan in place for the long term preservation and access of their archives. Online content that continues to be published by newsrooms is also at risk. According to the Pew Research Center, 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are already gone and nearly a quarter of news webpages contain at least one broken link. The local record of our communities is vanishing in real time.
This urgent challenge is what brought two very different professions together on June 17 in National Harbor, Maryland. Hosted by the Internet Archive with the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the National Summit on Local News Preservation gathered journalists, editors, archivists, librarians, and researchers to start a conversation between the newsrooms producing local journalism and the memory institutions preserving it. This event was a part of the Today’s News for Tomorrow (TNT) program, an Internet Archive initiative supported by a grant from Press Forward. The program provides training, tools, and support directly to up to 300 newsrooms nationwide and helps develop collaborative partnerships between archives and news organizations.
Librarians and archivists understand what’s at stake and have been working to address these challenges for a long time. Local news supports a range of information needs for the historians, scholars, students, and citizens they serve. Frequent updates, complex multimedia content, and paywalls are just some of the obstacles they face when working to capture online news while still stewarding decades of journalism produced on physical formats. Journalists also understand how valuable their work is as a record of the communities they cover. Faced with reduced staffing and shrinking budgets, they are forced to focus on tomorrow’s deadline, not who will need access to this story fifty years from now. While the challenges and urgency are well understood by both sectors, there are few models for working together to address this crisis. Taking steps towards developing an actionable plan was the purpose of the Summit.
Panelists Randa Cardwell (Photojournalism Archive Project), Becca Bender (Rhode Island News Media Archive), Stephanie Jenkins (Archival Producers Alliance), Cassidy Meurer (University of Louisville), and Frank LoMonte (CNN) discuss the particular challenges of preserving TV news and photojournalism.
The day mixed expert panels with structured discussion. Panelists tackled hard questions: conflicts over rights and revenue, how to connect communities to archived news, and how libraries and newsrooms can realistically partner together. One panel focused on the particular difficulty of preserving local TV news and photojournalism. Case studies were shared from the professionals doing this work right now in newsrooms, public libraries, state libraries, non-profits, and research groups.
An attendee reports out on their group’s discussion
Then attendees worked together in breakout discussion groups built around five topics: Access and Discovery; Infrastructure and Technology; Organizational Culture and Partnerships; Rights, Revenue, and the Public Good; and Sustainability and Advocacy. Each group named the obstacles in their area and drafted short and long term recommendations aimed at addressing them. Common themes emerged from across all of the groups. Several groups advocated for immediate action across both types of organizations stating that holding out for perfect standards or reliable national infrastructure would result in more information loss. Groups also kept returning to a point that publishers may find counterintuitive: making an archive discoverable and freely accessible tends to directly benefit newsrooms. And more than one group, working separately, proposed the same ambitious idea: a Report for America style fellowship that places archivists inside newsrooms to develop preservation plans and workflows that can be embedded into core operations. Those are just a few of the ideas that came out of the event. Later this summer, a full report will be published and shared widely.
A group of attendees discuss organizational culture and partnerships
As some publishers block the preservation of their websites and local newsrooms continue to shrink, this work has never been more urgent. But the stakeholders who can do something about ensuring that local news persists, that it continues being produced and preserved, are thinking big and taking action. Many of them spent June 17 in National Harbor, working together towards a future where local news isn’t at risk of vanishing.
Join Internet Archive, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), and the Poynter Institute for the National Summit on Local News Preservation. This event will bring together the producers, preservers, and users of local news to develop collaborative, scalable solutions to address the urgent preservation challenges presented by the rapidly changing local news landscape.
This free, in-person event will be held on June 17, 2026 in conjunction with the IRE 2026 Conference in National Harbor, Maryland just outside of Washington, DC.
Through panels, presentations, and facilitated discussions, Summit attendees will:
Discover proven strategies and partnerships behind successful local news preservation initiatives
Shape recommendations for local news preservation to be distributed nationally to newsrooms and memory institutions
Network with leaders from news and cultural heritage organizations
Explore tools and programs that can support the preservation and access of local digital news assets
This event is part of Today’s News for Tomorrow, a program supported by Press Forward. Additional support for the Summit has been provided by the Society of American Archivists Foundation.
Internet Archive, Poynter Institute, and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) are pleased to announce the first cohort of newsrooms to join the Today’s News for Tomorrow program. With support from Press Forward, Today’s News for Tomorrow will bring together news organizations and memory institutions to address the urgent challenge of local news preservation and perpetual access. The project will create a national framework for digital preservation that serves newsrooms’ “immediate internal needs and communities’ future information needs,” according to Press Forward.
“Journalism is the first draft of history, and we’re at risk of losing that history due to changes in a newsroom’s technology, ownership, and even outside pressure to erase it,” said Kristen Hare, program instructor and Poynter’s director for craft and local news. “Today’s News for Tomorrow will help local journalists and newsrooms learn what we’re up against and make sure the first draft of news is still around for future generations.”
Participating newsrooms will receive access to Internet Archive’s services, tools, and infrastructure, share public local news resources through a unified local news access portal, and participate in knowledge-sharing opportunities centered around local news archiving.
The first cohort will be made up of digital local news publications. Future cohorts in 2026 will be tailored to meet the preservation needs of print newspapers, public media organizations, and independent journalists. Members of the initial cohort were selected through a competitive application process and include:
The Berkeley Scanner (Berkeley, CA)
The Jefferson County Beacon (Port Townsend, WA)
Cityside (Berkeley, CA)
Athens County Independent (Athens, OH)
Hoy en Delaware (Wilmington, DE)
Bucks County Beacon (Warminster, PA)
Golden Today (Golden, CO)
The 51st (Washington, DC)
15 West (Chicago, IL)
The Rapidian (Grand Rapids, MI)
My Tarboro Today (Tarboro, NC)
Outlier Media (Detroit, MI)
Hmong Daily News (Sacramento, CA)
Front Range Focus (Denver, CO)
Lake County News (Lucerne, CA)
The Providence Eye (Providence, RI)
Grandview Independent (Richmond, CA)
The Well News (Washington, DC)
Prism Reports (Oakland, CA)
El Paso Matters (El Paso, TX)
The Oaklandside (Oakland, CA)
The Current GA (Savannah, GA)
Germantown Info Hub (Philadelphia, PA)
Evanston Now (Evanston, IL)
Conecta Arizona (Phoenix, AZ)
Charlottesville Tomorrow (Charlottesville, VA)
Wisconsin Watch (Madison, WI)
BK Reader (Brooklyn, NY)
Black Girl Nerds (Virginia Beach, VA)
Lede New Orleans (New Orleans, LA)
U.S. Press Freedom Tracker (Brooklyn, NY)
Wired (New York City, NY)
El Central Hispanic News (Detroit, MI)
Noozhawk (Santa Barbara, CA)
Newsrooms are encouraged to apply to join future cohorts. Newsrooms publishing print newspapers should apply to join the next cohort by April 1. All other organizations may apply at any time to join additional cohorts. Questions about the program can be directed to the program team at tnt@archive.org.
Public librarians are shaping the future of the historic record. As experts in community knowledge dedicated to serving local information needs, these librarians are uniquely positioned to preserve and provide access to their community’s stories. Since 2017, Internet Archive’s Community Webs program has provided training, support, and services to empower public libraries to preserve local digital heritage.
For rural public libraries, this crucial work may be particularly challenging. While a range of cultural heritage institutions may play a role in local preservation initiatives focused on larger communities, the public library may be the only organization engaging in this work in a rural area. Resource constraints, however, make it difficult for rural libraries to take on new initiatives and they may lack access to tools, training, and technology to support these efforts. Yet documenting how history is happening in these communities is essential for ensuring a more complete historic record. Without participation from rural libraries, these local stories may go untold, unheard, and undocumented.
Librarians from rural and small librarians across the country gathered in Albuquerque for a workshop hosted by Internet Archive’s Community Webs program.
In response to these challenges and opportunities, Internet Archive has recently focused on recruiting rural libraries into the Community Webs program, providing them with access to web archiving and digital preservation services as well as training and support at no cost. On September 20th, a group of these program members from across the country came together to learn about practical methods and accessible resources that can be used to document, preserve, and share local history in rural communities. Hosted in conjunction with the Association for Rural and Small Libraries Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the event was an opportunity for participants to work with Internet Archive staff and their peers from similar institutions to develop plans for implementing community-focused preservation initiatives.
A screenshot from a website captured by workshop participant Belen Public Library. Belen, New Mexico is south of Albuquerque with a population under 8,000.
Over the course of the workshop, participants learned strategies for developing community partnerships, providing access to digital collections, and ensuring long term preservation of digital assets. Participatory preservation initiatives such as community scanning days and oral history programs were also covered. Particular attention was paid to the preservation of web-based local content. From the websites of community organizations to local news sites to neighborhood blogs, web archiving is critical for libraries working to preserve their community’s story as it unfolds. Attendees learned how to use Archive-It to both preserve and provide access to web archive collections. They then brainstormed about what local online information possessed enduring value for their current and future community members. Many attendees cited local newspapers that had moved to online-only distribution, town or county government webpages, and online information about community resources and services as content they would include in their web archives.
Internet Archive will continue to offer support through the Community Webs program for these libraries as they take what they learned in this workshop and begin to apply it locally. Thank you to the Mellon Foundation whose support allows our team to host events like this and continue to expand the Community Webs program. We also wish to thank all of the libraries that participated in our recent workshop:
Asotin Public Library (Washington), Belen Public Library (New Mexico), Cairo Public Library (New York), Charlotte Public Library (Vermont), Dodge Center Public Library (Minnesota), Hillsboro Community Library (New Mexico), Holbrook Public Library (Massachusetts), Jemez Springs Public Library (New Mexico), Kendall Young Library (Iowa), Middlebury Public Library (Indiana), Milltown Public Library (New Jersey), Mount Pleasant Public Library (Texas), Randolph County Public Libraries (North Carolina), Salem-South Lyon District Library (Michigan), Scott County Library System (Iowa), Smithville Public Library (Texas), Sweet Home Public Library (Oregon), Van Horn Public Library (Minnesota), Westford Public Library (Vermont), and Yavapai County Free Library District (Arizona)
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.
Screenshots from an archived blogpost by Brian Fies—“A Fire Story, COMPLETE,” The Fies Files, 15 October 2017.
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.
Sutter Health’s Heroes Among Us interview project.
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.
An archived tweet from the Santa Rosa Fire Department at the one-year anniversary
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.”
An image from the archived page “Book of Days: A Covid Kitchen Chronicle” by List Goldman Douglas
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.
Screenshot of collectively created directory, archived 23 October 2020
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/RaícesComunitarias—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.
Art historians, critics, curators, and humanities scholars rely on the records of artists, galleries, museums, and arts organizations to understand and contextualize contemporary artistic practice. Yet, much of the art-related materials that were once published in print form are now available primarily or solely on the web and are ephemeral by nature. In response to this challenge, more than 40 art libraries, museums, and organizations from across the United States and Canada have partnered with Internet Archive to establish a collective approach to the preservation of web-based art content at scale: The Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA).
Since 2018, members of CARTA have worked together to identify, preserve, and provide access to at-risk online content related to the arts. The program relies on the expertise of those working in art libraries and museums by asking them to nominate sites for inclusion in the archive. Internet Archive web archivists then work to capture the sites and make the preserved content available in the CARTA collections portal.
Sumitra Duncan, Head of the Web Archiving Program at the New York Art Resources Consortium/The Frick Collection, was one of the founding program members and currently serves as the CARTA Advisory Board Chair. In speaking about the program, she reflected “It’s been tremendous to see what we’ve all been able to achieve together with CARTA in just a few years of working collaboratively, with over 40 member organizations having contributed. This work isn’t as easily accomplished alone (especially for those who are part of a small museum staff, face shrinking budgets for subscriptions, or are the solo archivist/librarian at their organization), so CARTA has allowed many art library colleagues to join the effort and share their expertise for collection development to ensure that these ephemeral materials are being preserved before disappearing from the live web.”
While CARTA is a member-supported program, mission-aligned organizations experiencing financial constraints may apply to join through the Sponsored Membership Program. One of CARTA’s sponsored members is the American Craft Council, a nonprofit organization that celebrates the history, practice, and unique storytelling of American craftwork. “I was very happy to be invited back to join CARTA as a sponsored member,” said Beth Goodrich, Archivist at the American Craft Council. “It was very important to me to see that the field of craft is recognized and reflected in the archival record of art in America and around the world.”
Each CARTA member brings their own unique expertise to the program, often contributing nominations connected to the regions, styles, and media represented in their institution’s collections. Marie Chant, Digital Archivist at the Museum of Glass, explained “Museum of Glass has been digitally documenting vibrant and innovative glass artists in our state-of-the-art Hot Shop for over twenty years. Joining CARTA was a natural next step for our work and will help further support our collection of born-digital glass art documentation. We are excited to work with the Internet Archive and other CARTA institutions committed to preserving significant web-based contemporary art resources for generations to come.”
In addition to nonprofit organizations and museums, CARTA’s membership also includes university art libraries. One of these contributors is Kristy Waller, Archivist at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. “Emily Carr University (ECU) was pleased to be selected to participate in CARTA as a sponsored member and we are excited to contribute Canadian art and design content. ECU supports both emerging and established artists by documenting arts education and practice through its websites and resources. We tried to crawl these sites manually using open-source tools, but arts content is often complicated and media heavy, making this work unsustainable on our budget. Through our involvement in CARTA, we are able to preserve content for the ECU community and beyond; as well as collaborate with local arts organizations to nominate artist-run centres and artists’ web sites – always with the goal of increasing meaningful access to arts content for future researchers.”
As the CARTA collections and membership continue to grow, collaborators are pursuing more opportunities to preserve and provide access to art resources from communities and organizations across the world. “I’m very grateful to CARTA members and the Internet Archive staff for their dedication and shared vision for the success and continued growth of this program via coordinated collaboration,” said Duncan. “I’m excited to see how we can further get the word out about the wonderful resources we have within the CARTA collections and to recruit additional members to the CARTA cohort who can bring unique perspectives to subject areas not yet represented by the sites we’ve archived thus far.”
“CARTA is transformative in the realm of preserving web-based art history,” said Heather Slania, who began her involvement with the program while working at the Maryland Institute College of Art and now serves as the Chief Librarian of the National Gallery of Art. “Its collaborative nature is vital for managing the vast and interconnected art world. I strongly encourage large and small institutions to join this essential endeavor. By contributing to CARTA, you are preserving art information and ensuring that future generations have a rich and diverse understanding of today’s art landscape.”
