Attention Students : Which websites would you want to save for future generations?

[Luke_Wilbur]

Be among the middle or high schools selected to have students help capture and archive today's primary source materials on the Web.

 

There is a growing awareness among libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions of the importance and urgency of preserving the often transitory digital cultural artifacts distributed over the Web. But so far, most decisions about what Web sites will live into the future have been made by adults, and reflect adults' sensibilities about which records are historically significant. In order to broaden this perspective, the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress launched the K-12 Web Archiving Program.

 

The K-12 Web Archiving Program has two primary objectives:

 

1. Archive the Web from the perspective of students to ensure that at risk digital content that is important to them is captured and preserved forever.

 

2. Stimulate students to think about history and actively participate in selecting the primary sources of today for historical research tomorrow.

 

The program explores archiving the Web from students' perspectives. Participants use the Archive-It service from the Internet Archive to create "time capsules" of born digital content available via the Web chosen by students to represent their world. Visit http://archive-it.org/k12/ to see comments and collections from previous participants.

 

By allowing students to identify sites that will be preserved, the program gives K-12 students a chance to document their cultural history and the world that's important to them. Unlike time capsules of tangible objects, which usually remain hidden for decades or centuries, the resulting Web collections will be immediately visible and publicly accessible, with full text search for study and analysis. Stimulating young people to think about history in the context of their own lives will enrich their study of history, provide an opportunity to actively engage in selecting the matter of history in the future, and help students begin to grasp the tremendous challenges presented by a world in which information can be both generated and removed with a key stroke.

 

To learn more about Archive-It, please visit our home page athttp://www.archive-it.org/or contactus.

 

To learn more about the Library of Congress NDIIPP initiative,please visit http://www.digitalpreservation.gov.

 

To learn more about the Library of Congress Teaching withPrimary Sources program please visit http://www.loc.gov/teachers.

Edited May 16, 2010 by Luke_Wilbur