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Grant Award Will Support Digitization of Diverse Local History Collections
Internet Archive’s Community Webs program has received a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and their Digitizing Hidden Collections program to digitize and provide open access to thirty local history collections from six partner organizations across the US and Canada.
“This grant lets us expand access outside of our building and really showcase the stories and lived experience of people and organizations that have been fighting for equality and doing important work throughout Atlanta,” said Derek T. Mosley, Archives Division Manager of the Auburn Avenue Research Library (AARL) on African American History and Culture in Atlanta, Georgia. AARL will receive digitization support for collections documenting leaders, artists, scholars, and advocacy groups in Atlanta. The personal papers of scholars and community leaders Duncan E. Teague, Craig Washington, Anthony “Tony” Daniels, and Dr. Shirlene Holmes will also be digitized.
Four collections will be digitized from Colorado’s Pikes Peak Library District including the records of the Colorado Springs Pride Center, The Citizens Project, and the Pikes Peak Lavender Film Festival. A selection of related photographs from the Colorado Springs Gazette will also be made available digitally.
Invisible Histories will partner with the Birmingham Public Library to complete digitization of the papers of prominent leaders in the lesbian communities of Mississippi and Alabama. “Invisible Histories is thrilled to be able to make these very rare and important examples of Southern Lesbian history available for everyone,” Invisible Histories Co-Executive Director Joshua Burford stated.
Collections to be digitized from the San Francisco Public Library include the papers of local authors and activists Barbara M. Cameron and Christopher Hewitt as well as the records of the local theater group Pomo Afro Homos. The ArQuives, based in Canada, will digitize the personal papers of early figures in Canada’s gay liberation movement.
The Rochester Public Library will digitize the personal papers of Rochester-based gay rights communities and the records of related cultural organizations. “The eight collections chosen for digitization as part of this grant are a treasure trove for researchers seeking to understand how LGBTQIA+ life and activism has evolved outside of major centers such as New York City and San Francisco,” explained Shalis Worthy, Historical Services Coordinator for the Rochester Public Library.
Once digitized, these collections will be accessible to local communities and researchers all over the world, providing valuable evidence of community history and culture.
Rural Libraries Receive Support from the Internet Archive to Preserve Community Stories
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.
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.
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)
Interested in learning more about Community Webs? Explore Community Webs collections, read the latest program news, or apply to join!
Archiving Resilience: How a Public Library Preserved Their Community’s Response to a Local Disaster
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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/Raíces Comunitarias—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.
CARTA: A Collective Approach to the Preservation of Online Art Resources
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.”
See more of the archived website here.
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.”
See more of the archived website here.
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.”
See more of the archived website here.
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.”
Learn more about the CARTA program, explore the CARTA collections portal, or reach out to the CARTA program team for more information.
Local Voices, Lasting Impact: Digitizing a Community Magazine in Hancock County, Mississippi
The following guest post from Ash Parker, Collections & Digital Services Librarian at the Hancock County Library System in Mississippi, 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.
Hancock County Library System is located on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and serves a population of around 47,000. Our community and stakeholders are dedicated to preserving the history of Hancock County and the coast—and they told us that this was a priority during strategic planning. This community feedback led the library to join the Community Webs program in the spring of 2023. With support from the program, we began preserving websites related to the area’s culture, civic associations, local government, and more.
In late 2024, staff arrived to discover a devastating leak in our main branch and system headquarters. Our Mississippi/Louisiana Special Collection was particularly affected, and we rushed to fan and dry hundreds of books. As we assessed the damage, it was clear that the pamphlets, books, and newsletters in the collection contained stories vital to this community’s history. We saw the importance of starting a digitization initiative aimed at increasing access to these unique local history resources. We began utilizing the Vault digital preservation service and providing access to our digitized collections through Internet Archive.
OPPORTUNITY TO DIGITIZE THE MISSISSIPPI STAR
When the opportunity arose to participate in the Increasing Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections project, a Community Webs digitization initiative supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the timing could not have been better. HCLS had the motivation to begin digitizing our collections and the existing relationship with Community Webs and the Internet Archive was ideal.
But what items to select for digitization? Enter the Mississippi Star.
The recent damage assessment of our Mississippi collection led me to remember a small, booklet-style magazine featuring local people, events, and topics of interest—created for and by the Mississippi Coast African American community. Recognizing the editor, Maurice Singleton, Jr., as a regular library patron, I was able to get enthusiastic permission for the Internet Archive to digitize and share 40 issues of the Mississippi Star.
This publication ran from August 1996 to the end of 2000. The five principles guiding the Star—”family, health, education, business, and culture”—provided the Black community with not just visibility, but the positive representation sorely missing in other local publications. In the first issue published in 1996, editor Maurice Singleton wrote, “Media is often referred to as a ‘mirror’ of our society. If this is the case, very little of what I read in the newspapers or watch on the evening news represents me, my friends, the people with whom I worship or the people with whom I exchange waves over the course of a day.” During its four-year run, the Mississippi Star gave readers a platform to see themselves and their community excelling and achieving together.
The Mississippi Star was digitized at the Internet Archive’s scanning center in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Once the digitization process was complete, Hancock County residents gained easy, online access to a collection that likely few realized was available at their library. Outside Hancock County and Mississippi, researchers and the public interested in a variety of topics—Mississippi history, the Civil Rights Movement and its impact, community-centered media, and more—have access via the World Wide Web to quality scans and full-text search. HCLS hopes to track down the missing issues to be able to provide the full run of this publication in the future.
SPIN-OFF PROJECTS: ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW AND PUBLIC PROGRAM
HCLS partnered with Maurice Singleton on related projects, including an oral history interview in April. Once complete, the audio recording and transcript will join this digital collection and provide additional context and nuance. We also held a public program in May to spotlight and celebrate the collection. Maurice spoke to the community about his memories of publishing the Mississippi Star—the inspiration, influences, and community impact—highlighting some of the more memorable articles. Attendees had a chance to see the physical issues held by the library and browse the digital collection on a touchscreen kiosk. The storytelling and remembrances during the program demonstrated the impact of community-centered archiving. Thirty years later, photographs of fellow community members captured interest and attention as people laughed and connected. Maurice came alive as he told his story and engaged with questions from the audience. As the program closed, the community came together to reflect on the importance of preserving community history. Maurice recalled a gentleman who had gently urged him to “bring back the Star” over the years since he’d stopped publication. This project had brought the Mississippi Star back for Maurice, for the community, and beyond.
SPOTLIGHT ON THE MISSISSIPPI STAR: MEMORABLE ISSUES
The Mississippi Star magazine provided a monthly glimpse into the Black community of the Mississippi Coast and the State in the late 1990s. The publication included local news, features, interviews, book reviews, advertising from local businesses, and letters from readers—all presenting a positive view of the Black community and holding to the values of family, health, education, business, and culture. Maurice shared that readers sometimes referred to the magazine as the Mississippi Jet, referencing one of the few publications with positive Black representation at the time (the other memorable example being Ebony).
Interview with the Family of Slain Civil Rights Leader Vernon Dahmer, Sr.
During its run, Maurice highlighted interviews in 1998 with the family of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer, Sr. as most memorable and important. Dahmer was murdered in 1966 on orders of the Ku Klux Klan after gaining attention for helping Black Mississippians vote. At the time of the first interview in February 1998, stalled justice was being re-energized. Billy Roy Pitts, who was convicted but had not served a life sentence, turned himself in to state officials and later was a key witness for the prosecution of the KKK leader who ordered the murder.
In a follow-up interview in September 1998, Maurice spoke with the family after the August conviction and sentencing of the man responsible for the murder of Vernon Dahmer, Sr. thirty-two years after the event. Reflecting on the recent trial and what was different from 1966, Mrs. Ellie Dahmer, Vernon Dahmer, Sr.’s widow said, “The climate in Mississippi has changed. People would tolerate what Sam Bowers did in the 1960s. I don’t think he had as many people to sympathize with him as he did then.”
The timely importance of this moment in South Mississippi history was reinforced by the community response. In the March 1998 issue, a reader wrote, “A few words about this heart wrenching story about the plight of Mr. Dahmer and his family. In my opinion this man was truly committed, with great courage and no compromise. I will always remember the Dahmer family when I think of the Kings, Evers and Rosa Parks.”
Interview with and Tribute to Dr. Gilbert Mason
Maurice also interviewed civil rights leader Dr. Gilbert Mason of Biloxi. Widely known for leading the ‘Wade In’ protests in response to segregated beaches on the Mississippi Coast in the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Mason was a driving force for the Black community on the Coast and a long-serving president of Biloxi’s NAACP. Remembering the protests, Dr. Mason said, “A small group of us had gone to the beach in 1959 and had been threatened that if we didn’t leave the beach they would remove us. That happened before the sit ins in Greensboro. That was one of the first protest acts we knew of. The youth branch of the NAACP had done sit ins, but this was one of the first in the Deep South.”
The Mississippi Star was published decades after the Civil Rights Movement and the key figures and actions from that point in history continued to impact the Black community in South Mississippi in the late 1990s. Feature articles and photographs from community events documented the importance of those historical leaders even as new leaders in the community emerged. Now, nearly thirty years later, this publication speaks to the progress and stories of Mississippi. Evidence of local happenings, successes, remembrances, public announcements, and day-to-day life are now available for locals and researchers from around the globe to access thanks to support from Community Webs and Internet Archive.
Browse the Mississippi Star Magazine collection on archive.org.
Public Librarians Partner with Internet Archive to Preserve Local Digital Heritage
Since 2017, Internet Archive’s Community Webs program has been empowering public libraries and similar organizations to preserve and provide access to the unique culture and digital heritage of their communities. Members of the program receive Internet Archive’s Archive-It web archiving service and Vault digital preservation service, coordinate on funded digitization projects to bring local history collections online, and engage in training, collaboration, and professional development opportunities. The program started with 26 public libraries and has since expanded to over 270 members from across 46 US states, 7 Canadian provinces, and a growing number from outside of North America.
Collectively, these members have preserved tens of thousands of websites totaling over 200 terabytes of data. From local news and politics to arts and culture and neighborhood blogs, these websites provide evidence of how history is unfolding in local communities. As this evidence has increasingly moved online, it has become crucial for community-focused cultural heritage organizations to ensure they have the proper training and tools for preserving and providing access to web-based content.
“Local history is all about creating meaning in people’s lives by providing a context for understanding how every resident fits into the continuum that is the history of our town. To fulfill this promise, I am working to diversify our contemporary holdings so that they more accurately represent our town’s current character and demographics. But I am continually thwarted by format,” said Anthony Vaver of Westborough Public Library in Massachusetts. “I can ask organizations to donate or scan any print materials that document their history, but because their activity is mostly web-based, the print records may not even be the most important for that organization. The Community Webs program helps us collect meaningful materials across all formats.”
Many Community Webs members have launched web archiving initiatives at their libraries as a result of the changing local news landscape. As communities have seen their newspapers close, merge, or move to online-only formats, libraries have needed to quickly respond to ensure this irreplaceable local information is available for future users.
“With a decline in the number of print newspapers, it is imperative that local, grassroots news websites be archived,” said Desiree Funston, a librarian at Missoula Public Library in Montana, “History is happening all around us; Community Webs empowers us to preserve it for the future.”
Funston, who also represents the Montana State Genealogical Society in the program, went on to describe how changes in local news will impact the future of genealogical research if local organizations don’t act now to preserve online content. “As the cost of publishing newspaper obituaries continues to climb, people are choosing instead to post tributes to their deceased loved ones on funeral home websites,” she said. “If the funeral home should go out of business or its website be compromised, those obituaries would be lost forever. Our partnership with Community Webs enables us to create a permanent web archive of online obituaries from across the state of Montana. This collection will have a lasting impact on genealogists who research Montana residents.”
In describing her work to preserve the community newsletter The Cedar Mill News, Liz Paulus of the Cedar Mill and Bethany Community Libraries in Oregon said, “These pages showcase a rich and varied record of community engagement and culture that would otherwise be undiscoverable. The Cedar Mill and Bethany Libraries are fortunate to have this opportunity to use the Archive-It platform to create web archives that shine a light on our communities making their way through times of change and growth, offering glimpses of the past to help inform our future.”
Every community has its own unique culture and Community Webs members have worked to document that culture through web archiving. Ash Parker of Hancock County Library System (HCLS) in Mississippi described preserving an important local tradition by saying, “One of HLCS’s first collecting priorities was preserving web content about one of the local traditions that makes the Mississippi Gulf Coast unique – Mardi Gras. Hancock County is about an hour away from iconic New Orleans. Local residents, some of whom are themselves transplants from New Orleans, are serious about their Carnival traditions. We currently capture the websites of some of our main Krewes, groups that spend most of the year planning parades and balls during Carnival season, and curate local news articles capturing the history of these treasured events. We hope to continue preserving this local tradition for future generations through digitizing physical items and crawling born-digital content on the Internet. As this collection grows, it will be a searchable trove of information and images that captures this special side of the Gulf Coast.”
Other program members have found that reaching out to local website creators about preserving their online content has led to opportunities for collaboration and community-building. “Reaching out to site owners to inform them of our web archiving has, of course, made it possible to ensure that their web content remains accessible even when their project or ability to pay for web hosting ends, but it has also been a wonderful opportunity to start conversations and forge new connections: We see you. We believe that your work has enduring value. We are here to help it endure,” said Carissa Pfeiffer of Buncombe County Libraries in North Carolina. “So far, we have saved at least one blog and one genealogy resource which had been planned for deletion by their respective owners, alongside websites whose contents reveal, for instance, public efforts to hold local government accountable for reparations efforts.”
Pfeiffer also reflected on the importance of archiving online content in the aftermath of a natural disaster. “In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina. A critical challenge was the near-total loss of regular methods of communications (internet, cell service, and power). As WiFi began to return, first to local hubs like public libraries, new web pages popped up—crowdsourced roundups of information on where to find supplies, websites for grassroots relief organizations, dedicated Helene resource pages from local governments—and then changed rapidly as new information was shared,” she said. “Thanks to Community Webs, we’ve been able to document these early examples of information-sharing during a disaster, along with news articles, blog posts, web-published reports, and so much more. As our region comes up on the one-year mark following Helene, researchers can use these resources to analyze what took place, and plan for resiliency moving forward.”
Interested in learning more about Community Webs? Explore Community Webs collections, read the latest program news, or apply to join!
Internet Archive and Partners Receive Press Forward Funding to Support Preserving Local News
We are excited to announce that Internet Archive, working with partners Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) and The Poynter Institute, has received a $1 million grant from Press Forward, a national initiative to reimagine local news. The funding is part of Press Forward’s Open Call on Infrastructure, which is providing $22.7 million to 22 projects that address the urgent challenges local newsrooms face today.
The grant will support development of the “Today’s News for Tomorrow” national program by Internet Archive, IRE, and The Poynter Institute to provide infrastructure, preservation services, training, and community building that enable local newsrooms and journalists to ensure the archiving and perpetual access of their their publications, digital assets, and other materials. As the first draft of history, local news published today is a critical resource documenting the lives and stories of the American people as well as an essential record for use by students, historians, and researchers. The “Today’s News for Tomorrow” program will address the financial and operational challenges that many local news organizations face in managing and preserving their digital materials both for their immediate internal needs and the future information needs of their communities.
The Press Forward funding will allow the program partners to provide infrastructure and training to over 300 newsrooms and journalists across the country, with a focus on vital local online news that is particularly at risk. Internet Archive’s web archive has long been an essential resource for journalists in their reporting. Pairing Internet Archive’s preservation infrastructure and services with IRE’s and The Poynter Institute’s experience in training and community support for journalists will further Press Forward’s goal to strengthen communities by revitalizing local news. The “Today’s News for Tomorrow” program also builds on Internet Archive’s successful “Community Webs” national program which has received nearly $3M in funding to provide preservation services and cohort-based training to over 275 libraries, museums, and municipalities from 46 states and 7 Canadian provinces in support of their work documenting the history of their communities.
We thank Press Forward and The Miami Foundation for their support of “Today’s News for Tomorrow.” We are excited to work closely with IRE and The Poynter Institute supporting newsrooms and journalists and are honored to be part of the group of organizations receiving funding as part of Press Forward’s Open Call on Infrastructure. The full list of recipients is available online at pressforward.news/infrastructure25.
Librarians Convene to Develop Strategies for Documenting Their Community’s Digital Heritage
A group of librarians and cultural heritage workers from across the country recently convened at two events hosted by Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. Made possible in part with support from the Mellon Foundation, the meetings allowed librarians from across the country to discuss shared challenges and opportunities around documenting, preserving, and sharing the unique culture and digital heritage of their communities.
Launched in 2017, Internet Archive’s Community Webs program provides public libraries and similar organizations with the tools and support they need to document local communities. Members of the program receive access to Internet Archive’s Archive-It web archiving service and Vault digital preservation service, have coordinated on funded digitization projects to bring local history collections online, and receive training, technical support, and opportunities for collaboration and professional development. There are now over 260 members of the program from across 46 states, 7 Canadian provinces, and a growing number from outside of North America.
The first of these events was held on May 9 at Internet Archive Headquarters in San Francisco and brought together a small group of public librarians interested in launching new community-focused local preservation initiatives. As local information hubs and community connectors, public libraries play a critical role in the preservation and access of local history. Over the course of the day, attendees engaged in exercises and discussions that helped them develop plans to support this work in their communities.
The 2025 Community Webs National Symposium was held on June 25 and 26 in Philadelphia ahead of the American Library Association annual conference. This two-day event brought together 40 Community Webs members representing a range of cultural heritage institutions. Attendees participated in workshops on community archiving and digital preservation led by Queens Memory Project founder Natalie Milbrodt and Digital POWRR instructor Danielle Taylor, listened to presentations from Community Webs members on local projects they are leading in their communities, and toured the Parkway Central Library Special Collections.
A main goal of the Community Webs program is to create opportunities for multi-institutional collaboration across organizations devoted to preserving local history. In-person events like these provide a forum where members can build relationships, exchange ideas, and develop skills. By supporting the work of these cultural heritage practitioners to preserve local knowledge, Internet Archive is able to move closer to achieving its mission of “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”
Interested in learning more about Community Webs? Explore Community Webs collections, read the latest program news, or apply to join!
Keep on GIFin’ — A New Version of GifCities, Internet Archive’s GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine!
We are excited to announce a new version of GifCities, Internet Archive’s GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine!
GifCities was a special project of Internet Archive originally done as part of our 20th Anniversary in 2016 to highlight and celebrate fun aspects of the amazing history of the web as represented in the Wayback Machine. Since then, GifCities GIFs have been used in innumerable web projects, artistic works, and in the media and press, including this internet-melting combination of GifCities GIFs and the British Royal Wedding in this New York Times article and the avant-GIF “GifCollider” exhibit at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.
The new version of GifCities includes a number of new improvements. We are especially excited at the drastic improvement in “GifSearchies” by implementing semantic search for GifCities, instead of the hacky old “file name” text search of the original version. Note that via the “Special Search” tab, you can still search only by the old text-based index, for, uh, search index nostalgia purposes. But wait, you say, I need a specific-sized animated GIF for my project! No problemo, you can also now search for GIFs by size too. State of the world got you a bit anxious, dear reader? Calm thyself with 51 results pages of 150×20 pixel blinkies.
We also updated the results interface to add pagination for results instead of the original infinite scroll — that would sometimes paralyze your browser after a non-infinite amount of scrolling. And as with GifCities v1, each GIF links to the archived GeoCities page on which it originally appeared, many of these wonders unto themselves.
Finally, in the spirit of “sharing is caring” and “every GIF is truly a GIFT,” we have added the ability to make GifGrams that you can share with your special someones. Nothing says “I’m thinking of you” more than a custom webcard of GifCities GIFs and inspirational text, like “Hang in There” or “The Web is Yours for the Making.”
GifCities’s new semantic search index used a model called CLIP-ViT L/14 to analyze each frame of the GIFs and searching applies a “nearest neighbors algorithm” to find GIFs that match a vectorized query, allowing you to enter nuanced searches like “blue sparkling border‘ or (everybody’s favorite performing rodent) ‘”dancing hamster” and get matching results. Need more wolf snowglobe GIFs in your life? Yes, you do. Here ya go.
Thanks to all the GifCities enthusiasts out there that send us many messages each week on how they are using and enjoying the site. More details on GeoCities and GifCities are in the About page and a special thanks to enthusiast Ben Friesen who helped prototype using CLIP on GifCities. Now go browse some GeoCities GIFs and send some GifGrams!
Community Webs Digitization Grant Reveals Stories of San Francisco’s Immigrant Communities
The following guest post from Christina Moretta, Photo Curator and Acting San Francisco History Center Manager at San Francisco Public Library, 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.
San Francisco History Center (SFHC) of the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) is the official archive for the City and County of San Francisco. SFHC serves all library users and levels of interest, from the merely curious to those engaging in scholarly research. Because of the Center’s archival function, it also administers the archival collections of the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center.
Internet Archive has supported our work to preserve and provide access to San Francisco’s history in many ways. Since 2007, Internet Archive has hosted SFPL digitized content, including local documents and city directories. In 2017, SFPL became one of the first members of Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. This program has provided us with the tools we need to preserve local web-based content that will be important for future researchers investigating San Francisco’s history.
In 2023, the Community Webs program was awarded a grant from the National Historical Publication and Records Commission for the “Collaborative Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections” project. This grant supported the digitization of local history collections from libraries across the country, including SFPL. With this support, 23 bound volumes of a Chinese/English language newspaper East/West and 4 cartons of oral histories from the Paul Radin Papers were digitized by Internet Archive.
East/West
The East/West (Dong xi bao) newspaper was acquired the easy way – original subscription by the SFPL’s Periodical Department in the late 1960s. There are only a handful of institutions that have East/West in their holdings as microfilm only. SFHC has the complete run in paper format.
In late 1966, Gordon Lew and two Chinese newspaper colleagues, Kenneth Joe and Ken Wong, began the idea of East/West, a bilingual weekly newspaper published out of San Francisco’s Chinatown. The inaugural issue was in January 1967 and the newspaper ran for over twenty-two years with the last issue in September 1989. Lew became the publisher and editor, Joe worked in the Chinese section, and Wong was the principal writer in the English section. East/West was an important community newspaper, with extensive coverage of local Chinatown news, social activities, the work of Chinese American political figures, and international developments such as the normalization of China ties.
East/West was published in English and Chinese, and for many years, the two sections had approximately the same number of pages. The editorial and perhaps the main news article in the English section would be translated into Chinese. The Chinese section tended to focus more on culture, arts, and history, and it often reprinted articles from other sources. Advertisements filled both sections from the very beginning for local businesses and services. Most were community ads as the newspaper served non-profit organizations that arose in the wake of the Chinese American and Asian American empowerment movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Researchers and scholars of 20th-century Chinese American communities in the United States will appreciate the online availability of this unique resource. Many important issues cropped up in Chinese America and Asian America starting in the late 1960s and these can be found in East/West from the community perspective. By being a bilingual publication, the newspaper captured and shared the voice of the community. In addition, San Francisco Chinese Americans had limited political power in the 1960s. East/West focused on emerging Chinese American political figures and urged the community to increase its voting and general political participation.
Browse East/West on archive.org
Paul Radin Papers
In 2003, the Paul Radin Papers were donated to the SFHC by Professor Luis S. Kemnitzer of San Francisco State University on behalf of Calvin Fast Wolf and Mary Sacharoff-Fast Wolf. Mary Wolf was a would-be biographer of Radin who had acquired original papers from her friend and Radin’s widow, Doris Woodward Radin, as well as colleagues.
Dr. Paul Radin (1883-1959) is considered to be one of the formative influences in contemporary anthropology and ethnography in the United States and Europe. The bulk of the Paul Radin Papers consists of surveys from Radin’s supervision of over 200 workers who interviewed ethnic groups in the San Francisco Bay Area for the State Emergency Relief Administration of California (SERA) over a period of nine months in 1934-1935. Known as SERA project 2-F2-98 (3-F2-145), its abstract was published in 1935 as The Survey of San Francisco’s Minorities: Its Purpose and Results. The stated purpose was a cultural survey to find employment for “white collar” unemployed workers on temporary relief. Radin’s focus was “to study the steps in the adjustment and assimilation of minority groups in San Francisco and Alameda counties.” Bypassing a typical questionnaire method, Radin instead had the amateur interviewers record anything and everything which the interviewees wished to say. The results appear in a narrative format—sometimes in the form of poetry and short stories—and encompass all manner of immigrant experiences. Survey materials include typed and handwritten interviews and research on ethnic groups. Some interviewers identify themselves, and their report appears in their own hand.
A portion of the Paul Radin Papers includes SERA worker Jon Y. Lee’s papers including material for The Golden Mountain. Lee was the son of Chinese immigrants who settled in Oakland, California. Radin hired Lee as a fieldworker to collect Chinatown traditions in Oakland, California. Today, Lee is recognized as the first Asian American to work professionally as a folklorist.
With this collection online, international scholars can now easily access narratives about the immigrant experience from their country/region to assist with their diaspora studies. The typed descriptions allow for OCR discovery and for one to gather more information on the San Francisco immigrant experience in the 1910s and 1920s.
Browse the Paul Radin Papers on archive.org
Internet Archive and Community Webs are thankful for the support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for Collaborative Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections, which will digitize and provide access to a diverse range of local history archives that represent the experiences of immigrant, indigenous, and African American communities throughout the United States.