Join us to hear from members of the Community Webs NY Cohort on how they’ve successfully launched digital initiatives for their organizations. Community Webs is a collaborative program of the Internet Archive that supports libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage organizations in preserving digital collections and web content while building community around digital stewardship.
This session will include a panel of presenters discussing projects in digital preservation, web archiving, and community archiving. Following the presentations, participants can join topic-based breakout rooms for more in-depth discussion and Q&A on each of these subjects. Participants are encouraged to bring their challenges and questions to these interactive discussions.
Representatives from the Internet Archives’ Community Webs team will also be present to answer questions about the program and tools that helped to support these projects.
To ensure open discussion in the breakout rooms, only the first half of the session, where presentations are featured, will be recorded.
Panelists include:
Jessica Murray
At the College of Staten Island, Jessica Murray has been working since 2021 to collect materials for the New York Disability Rights Archive, documenting the efforts of activists and advocates from the 1940s to the present. With support from the Community Webs program, she is taking new approaches to this community archiving project, including collecting metadata for online collections and capturing ephemeral online materials.
Corey O’Hara and Krystal Valentin, The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
Mary Robison
Mary Robison leads the Local History Program for the Yonkers Public Library system and serves as the head of reference and adult services at the Yonkers Riverfront Library. The Community Webs project provides the Local History Program team with new resources to expand the work of preserving community history through archiving local news websites, as these take the place of print newspapers reporting local news.
Matthew Thorenz
Matthew Thorenz is the Local History & Government Docs librarian at Newburgh Free Library, serving the City and Town of Newburgh, New York. Using Internet Archive's "Archive-It" service, Matthew created an online collection of webpages, blogs, and articles documenting urban planning in the city post-1970. This was the Newburgh Free Library's first attempt to create a born-digital collection, which required Matthew to create a scalable project that could start small and grow as additional resources and stakeholders became available over time.