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.
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 phone number list 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.
Posted in Archive-It | Tagged community archives, web archiving |
New Project Will Unlock Access to Government Publications on Microfiche
Posted on March 15, 2022 by Caralee Adams
Government documents from microfiche are coming to archive.org based on the combined efforts of the Internet Archive and its Federal Depository Library Program library partners. The resulting files will be available for free public access to enable new analysis and access techniques.
Microfiche cards, which contain miniaturized thumbnails of the publication’s pages, are starting to be digitized and matched to catalog records by the Internet Archive. Once in a digital format and preserved on archive.org, these documents will be searchable and downloadable by anyone with an Internet connection, since U.S. government publications are in the public domain.