Archive-It

Would your genealogy society, historical society, town museum, or even a local school like to preserve collections of digital content and keep it on the web? Good intentions aside, does the organization have sufficient resources to build and maintain a web site for years? If not, you might want to consider using Archive-It from the Internet Archive.

Through a user friendly web application, Archive-It partners can collect, catalog, manage, access, search and archive their digital information collections.

Quoting the Archive-It web site:

First deployed in 2006, Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service from the Internet Archive that helps organizations to harvest, build, and preserve collections of digital content. Through our user friendly web application Archive-It partners can collect, catalog, and manage their collections of archived content with 24/7 access and full text search available for their use as well as their patrons. Content is hosted and stored at the Internet Archive data centers.

Archive-It presently is working with more than 190 partner organizations in 44 U.S. states and 16 countries worldwide. The types of organizations involved include:

• College and university libraries
• State archives, libraries, and historical societies
• Government organizations
• Non-profit organizations
• Museums and art libraries
• Public libraries and local institutions

Here are some of the ways organizations are presently using Archive-It:

• Fulfill an organization’s mandate to preserve institutional memory and history
• Archive state/local agency publications that aren’t being deposited in print form
• Capture websites and link them to existing collections around the same thematic focus
• Archive organizational culture, including online publications and social networking sites
• Create a web archive on a specific subject or event, including social media sites
• Collect government agency websites and an evolving online presence
• Maintain electronic records management system to meet government and university record retention policies

One special project is a K-12 Web Archiving Program. Students are invited to identify websites they would would like to save for future generations. The goal is to find those sites the students believe that people would want to look at 50 or even 500 years from now and then to preserve those sites on Archive-It.org.

The K12 Web Archiving Program is a partnership between the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress. Now in its fourth year, with 5th to 12th graders participating in schools across the country, this program provides a new perspective on saving history and culture, allowing students to actively participate and make decisions about what "at risk" website content will be saved.

Archive-It is a service of the non-profit Internet Archive at www.Archive.org

You can learn more at http://www.archive-it.org/. You might especially want to look at the online brochure available at http://www.archive-it.org/static/files/archiveit_brochure_2012.pdf

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