2022 Archive-It Virtual Partner Meeting Recap

November 10th, 2022

by Bridget Collings, Web Archivist for Archive-It

Archive-It’s sixteenth Partner Meeting was held virtually on November 2, 2022. A total of 120 Archive-It users and staff members joined us from across the US, Canada, and internationally for presentations on web archiving and related breakout sessions. In case you missed it, you can catch up on recordings and slides from this year’s presentations here in the Archive-It Help Center.

The Internet Archive’s Director of Archiving & Data Services Jefferson Bailey and Deputy Director Thomas Padilla kicked off the meeting by providing an Archiving and Data Services update. They discussed the work that has been done over the past year, including the public launch of the COVID-19 Web Archive and Community Webs access portals, and outlined roadmaps and priorities for Archive-It, ARCH, and Vault in the coming year. You can check out their presentation here.

Our program this year provided the opportunity for web archivists to learn more about ARCH and the research applications for web archives, as well as hear about the different approaches partners take to collaborate and coordinate web archiving workflows.

Screenshot of slide summarizing the COVID-19 Response in the Niagara Region research project with Cal Murgu presenting

Cal Murgu summarizes his research team’s project as part of the 2021-2022 Archives Unleashed Cohort.

Samatha Fritz (University of Waterloo, Archives Unleashed) provided an overview of ARCH and the Archives Unleased Cohorts program, with an emphasis on the research applications for web archives. She outlined the different research projects cohort members ran, and introduced one of the 2021-2022 Cohort participants, Cal Murgu (Brock University) who discussed how his team used ARCH to assess municipal responses to the COVID 19 Pandemic.

Miranda Siler (Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation) and Ryan Deniston (Duke University) presented on how they collaboratively collect state election campaign content, and discussed the challenges associated with this time consuming work. Robert Manley (Washington University in St. Louis) provided an overview of how he uses GitLab’s project management features to build web archiving workflows for coordination.

Screenshot of pyramid with explanation of WUSTL decisions with Robert Manley presenting

Robert Manley explains what led up to WUSTL’s adoption of GitLab as a Project Management tool for web archiving workflows.

The presentation portion of our meeting concluded with a moderated speaker panel on the theme of coordinating workflows and collaborations. The panel consisted of Valerie Collins (University of Minnesota), Daniel Johnson (University of Iowa), and Daniel Noonan (Ohio State University) and was moderated by Internet Archive Web Archivist, Karl Blumenthal. Panelists discussed how they formulate and implement their workflows, how they collaborate with other departments on their campuses to know what to archive, and discussed common pitfalls they would recommend avoiding. 

For those interested in checking out the resources that our presenters shared during their presentation, you can access them here.

After the presentation portion of the event concluded, participants were invited to join breakout rooms in Zoom to participate in either a discussion of various web archiving topics or join a demo session. There were 6 topics and 2 demos to choose from:

1. Account Admin Help Desk & New Users

2. ARCH: Archives Research Compute Hub (Demo session)

3. Archives Access

4. Community Programs & Collaborative Archiving

5. Quality Assurance

6. Seed Management (sharing, groups) 

7. Social Media   

8. Vault: Digital Preservation (Demo session)

The discussions in these breakout rooms were all facilitated by Internet Archive staff, and discussion points and questions were captured using Jamboard. We really appreciated the discussions that took place, and hope everyone found them to be valuable. If you are interested in looking at the Jamboard from the event, you can check it out here.

Screenshot of whiteboard with questions and Sticky Notes.

Screenshot of the Jamboard from the Quality Assurance breakout room discussion.

Thank you to all who attended this year’s Partner Meeting, and if you missed it, we hope to see you next time! If you attended this year’s virtual event, we would love to hear your feedback. Please let us know how you thought this event went, and provide any ideas you may have for future meetings by filling out this quick survey.

We look forward to meeting with you again next year, either virtually or in-person!