Library of Congress, Internet Archive, and CDL Team Up with Middle and High Schools for Web Archiving Project

By Rosalie Lack, CDL Digital Special Collections Director

The Library of Congress, Internet Archive, and CDL are collaborating on a project to archive web sites — from the perspective of middle and high school students — with a view toward preserving and integrating primary resources into the K-12 teaching curriculum.

Up to ten middle and high schools throughout the US will be selected to participate in this endeavor.  The project will use the Internet Archive’s Archive-It web archiving service to generate "time capsules" featuring collections that document social and cultural history relevant to the students’ lives.  Internet Archive will host the resources long-term and make the collections publicly available via the Archive-It website at http://www.archive-it.org.  Under the coordination of educators at the schools, students will identify, select, capture, and describe web resources using Archive-It over the course of the academic year, from October 2008 through May 2009.  Up to 300 websites can be crawled at any one time, and students can capture up to 10 million web-based documents.  The Library of Congress and CDL will provide program support, and the Internet Archive will provide technical resources.  This project is supported financially by the Library of Congress and the Internet Archive.

For more information and for application details, see the Library of Congress’ K-12 Web Archiving Project announcement (PDF).