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Raíces Cultural Center Accepted into Internet Archive’s Community Webs Partnership Program
by Erin Mustard
In October of 2024, Raíces was accepted as a partner in the Internet Archive’s Community Webs program, which provides support and tools for cultural heritage institutions to engage in digital preservation to web and community archiving. The Internet Archive is committed to providing free long-term access to documents, media, web pages, images, and software.
What is web archiving? Web archiving is a process of taking a snapshot of a website or webpage on a particular day and saving it to be viewed later on. You can archive your own website, other websites, and any webpages. Web archiving allows people to save websites like we do with digital files or physical paper, to be viewed later. You can archive websites or web pages over time, which allows people to see how a website, and its content, has changed over time.
The Community Webs project began as an IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) and Internet Archive funded program. The program has grown to include over 200 cultural heritage organizations, now supported by ongoing funding from the Mellon Foundation. The project’s focus on collective and community archiving has contributed to the expansion and diversification of the archival record. Participants have also created open resources for educational programming for web archiving, digital preservation, community archiving, and collection development.
The values of community identity, skill-sharing and development, and sharing untold or undertold stories are at the heart of Raíces Cultural Center’s Community History Program, and we are proud to be members of this program.
Here is a list of current participants. Within each institution, they have set up collections based on different topics, events, and/or themes. You can see that there are websites and webpages from all over the internet. You can view the collections here.
What does this mean for Raíces? In the coming months, we plan to preserve our current website, its exhibits, and its digital archive. We also plan to create thematic or geographical collections and begin to archive them, likely to focus on cultural arts and/or herbalism in our community and throughout the diaspora, for the community to use and reference. Creating a web archive allows us to further preserve and share resources and information with our community. We will also be attending training sessions with other oral history professionals, community archivists, and others who are sharing their tools and experiences to support Raíces’ skill-sharing program development, oral history projects, and digital archives
We invite you to participate in this partnership with us. You can tell us what you would like us to archive. Do you have a website you would like us to save? Or do you have a collection of web pages and websites around a theme or idea you would like saved and presented? Or if you are interested in learning more about web archiving, preservation, or organizing your own materials yourself, please get in touch with Erin so we can create programming and training opportunities for you.
