Web archiving partners meet in 2019
August 15th, 2019
by the Archive-It team
As more and more organizations are involved in web archiving, we want to make sure that their networks are close and supportive. Archive-It partners met twice this month: attendees of the joint Society of American Archivists and Council of State Archivists conference met at the University of Texas at Austin, and the first regional meeting of Archive-It partners in New England convened at Harvard University’s Lamont Library. (Special thanks to Stephen Abrams, Tricia Patterson, and the Harvard consortium for convening partners in the region!) Both events featured program and technology updates from Internet Archive staff, news and case studies from Archive-It partners, and informal time for discussion and working groups.
Sharing software feature ideas with Internet Archive Engineering Manager James Kafader and Senior Program Manager Lori Donovan, at the annual Archive-It Partner Meeting in Austin.
The meeting in Cambridge follows on several similar regional convenings and idea exchanges in New York City and the Mid-Atlantic region, and this past winter around the Midwinter meeting of the American Library Association in Seattle. Archive-It and other Internet Archive Web Services partners will next gather in Europe, at the annual International Conference on Digital Preservation, in Amsterdam – join us here.
Web Archivist Karl Blumenthal demonstrates the latest software updates for the first meeting of Archive-It partners in New England.
We use these meet-up opportunities to share the latest quality of life improvements for web archivists, but even more so to learn about their collections, workflows, and technical impediments, so we can inform and update our development roadmap going forward. Collecting partners use them in the meantime to compare strategies, efficiencies, and sticking points. Discussion of their different local software training needs in Seattle actually incubated a Train-the-Trainer webinar that will be available to all partners this fall, while Mid-Atlantic partner meetings convened a research team to study the user experience with web archives, soon to be published in The American Archivist.
More (and more local) meetings among Archive-It partners, Internet Archive staff, and aspiring web archivists cultivate web archiving support networks and invigorate tool development, so we’d love to see more of them! Please let us know (email the team at ait [at] archive [dot] org) if we can help to organize a meet-up, workshop, or more in your region.