Archiving projects protect the future by preserving the past

The practice of saving and safekeeping documents is nearly as old the written word. But lately archiving—choosing what to save, preserving it, and making it sustainably findable and accessible—has also become an act of responsive resistance in a world that may use erasure as a weapon.   

Safeguarding endangered material is a widespread concern—but the definition of “endangered” can be a broad one. The Data Rescue Project (DRP) has been in the news this year as it works to collect data sets from government websites before they can be taken down. The DRP has deeper roots, however, such as the Internet Archive (IA), End of Term Web Archive, EDGI (Environmental Data & Governance Initiative), and SUCHO: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, which has digitized and preserved Ukrainian cultural heritage sites since 2022. These groups are the Monuments Men of the internet age.

Yet culture and history are threatened by more than war and federal orders. The call to preserve starts with the awareness that memory is fragile, and that forgetting—and the subsequent erasure of stories, languages, culture, and information—can be institutionally driven as often as it is inadvertent.   

With the future of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, and other mainstays of support for preservation uncertain, the question remains: where will the resources and leadership—and the body of knowledge that stems from years of grant-making and collecting—come from? In the absence of concrete answers, a range of initiatives offer inspiration and hope.

Photographs from (top:) 100% Wrong Club records, 1959; and (bottom:) the Annie L. McPheeters papers; both from the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, Fulton County Library System, GA. Right: Two women embracing, collection of Lesbian Scrapbook Photographs, GLBT Historical Society.

NATIONAL HELP FOR COMMUNITY STORIES 

Most know IA as the nonprofit behind the Wayback Machine, which preserves online content and keeps it accessible as the internet continues to evolve. But its mission—universal access to all knowledge—is somewhat unwieldy. “What does that mean?” wonders IA’s Community Archiving Program Manager Anna Trammell. “How do we know what is worth preserving, what is important to communities, why we need to make this content accessible?”

The answer, IA leadership feels, lies with public libraries. While academic libraries have archiving infrastructure and workflow in place, public libraries are experts in the communities they serve and have an understanding of what needs to be preserved—but don’t always have support for that work. The IA’s Community Webs program was launched in 2017, with funding from IMLS, to help educate, train, and provide services to public libraries to build collections of historically valuable digital materials documenting their communities—“empowering them to define what’s important and to make sure that it’s preserved and accessible,” Trammell explains.

The program began with grants to 26 public libraries and has expanded, with funding from the Mellon Foundation, to community organizations and historical societies as well. In addition to training and support, the program now provides discoverability tools, through the central Community Webs portal and a partnership with the Digital Public Library of America, and industry-standard long-term preservation, plus help with general community engagement and outreach.

Web archiving is a constantly changing landscape, notes Trammell, and Community Webs gives libraries the training they need to do the work on their own and understand the preservation ecosystem. “It’s not necessarily about the specific tools,” she says. “It’s more, how can you think about developing a digital preservation workflow and digital preservation policies for your unique organization? How can you think about how the principles of community archiving can inform all of the work that you’re doing to preserve local history, whether that’s accepting physical donations, hosting community scanning days, web archiving, digital preservation—all of these aspects of this work.”

Another concern on the web preservation radar is ensuring that content from disappearing local news resources remains part of the record (see “Bookshelves to Bylines: When Libraries and Journalists Join Forces”). In July, IA received a $1 million grant from Press Forward—a national initiative to reimagine local news—to support the development of the “Today’s News for Tomorrow” national program that will engage public and academic libraries, along with museums and historical societies, to work alongside local newsrooms and journalists to archive and provide perpetual access to their publications.

Top: Community Webs members tour the Free Library of Philadelphia Special Collections. Bottom: Photographer Akito Tsuda at Chicago Public Library’s Pilsen Days exhibit.

LARGE LIBRARIES, STEP UP

Chicago Public Library (CPL) Commissioner Chris Brown agrees with the idea of libraries having unique insights into their local histories and adds that large public libraries have an especially critical role to play in collecting them. 

CPL recently mounted an exhibit of photographs by Japanese photographer Akito Tsuda, taken in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood in the 1990s. Pilsen has historically been a gateway for Chicago’s Mexican immigrant community, and the “Pilsen Days” display captured scenes of everyday life; the library also conducted interviews with Pilsen residents featured in or connected to the photos. 

The library has also received a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to digitize the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, which documents the Black experience of the Great Migration and beyond, with a strong focus on Chicago—the largest African American heritage archive in the Midwest. Nearly 100,000 items have been processed for access worldwide, and the grant has helped develop a supplementary open-source curriculum.

We are in a moment when “digital archives and access are going to become more important because there are going to be parts of our country where that visibility of immigrant narratives, or of our collective diversity, is not going to be present, or we’re going to start to get this dynamic of writers censoring themselves, or institutions censoring themselves,” says Brown—“people starting to question, are these identities okay to express? Is there a platform for them? Are our endowments going to get attacked or put under a microscope because we’re simply showing our collective and accurate diversity?”

FROM LOCAL TO NATIONAL

Derek Mosley, archivist and division manager at the Auburn Avenue Research Library (AARL) of the Fulton County Library System, GA, 2025–26 president of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), and 2024 LJ Mover and Shaker, began his career as a history major with plans to teach. But a college internship at the Atlanta University Center Woodruff Library changed his mind. Mosley discovered a path that would allow him to focus on Black culture and the Black experience—starting locally in Atlanta and expanding from there.

AARL’s archives began with collections documenting the civil rights movement, expanding to records of Black educators. In the past 10 to 15 years, AARL began to prioritize collecting Black LGBTQIA+ history in Atlanta. When Mosley arrived at the library in 2016, he brought an interest in Black church communities and has helped grow collections around metro Atlanta religious institutions. This includes collecting and digitizing Black funeral programs in partnership with the Atlanta chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society. The collection, which dates from the end of the 19th century, is widely used for genealogical research. 

Along the way, Mosley learned that even when collecting through a worthwhile lens, archivists need to continuously interrogate the decision-making process and look for those who have been left out of historical accounts; economic and class distinctions can also affect whose stories are told.

FIGHTING SILENCE

The very real damage of being silenced was an explicit message at the forefront of AIDS activism at the end of the last century, beginning with the Silence=Death Project in 1986. ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), founded in 1987, continued advocating for awareness in the face of stigma and discrimination and the lack of targeted research for AIDS treatment and prevention. But as with many grassroots movements, the memory of accomplishments can be lost without direct action to preserve them.

In 2001, writer Sarah Schulman was driving in Los Angeles, listening to NPR. The program was commemorating what was then considered to be the 20th anniversary of AIDS, and the announcer said, according to Schulman, “At first America had trouble with people with AIDS, but then [it] came around.” 

“I almost crashed the car,” she remembers. She pulled over and called documentary filmmaker Jim Hubbard. They decided that they needed to get the voices that told the story of AIDS activism out into the world; the internet was becoming ubiquitous, but none of ACT UP’s materials were digitized, and it was clear that an important piece of history was in danger of erasure.

With a grant from the Ford Foundation, Schulman and Hubbard bought equipment and software, built a website, and over the next 18 years, with cameraman James Wentzy, interviewed 187 surviving members of ACT UP New York. 

Getting the ACT UP Oral History Project into the public eye took actual legwork. “I often gave talks in bookstores, community centers, or universities, and I would bring, literally, video excerpts of interviews and show them, and I would meet with faculty or graduate students in relevant areas and try to encourage them to use the material,” says Schulman. Today, the history of AIDS and the activism that grew around it is taught in high school and college classes. The ACT UP Oral History Project, housed at both Harvard University’s Widener Library and New York Public Library, as well as the Library of Congress, has gotten more than 14 million hits, and nearly 700,000 users have downloaded transcripts.

SAVING LANGUAGE AND LORE

Silence can also be achieved by the erasure of culture, such as the loss of Indigenous languages and practices in the 21st century. 

CBC North is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio and television service for the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon of Northern Canada. Since 2016—a year after Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action were released to redress the devastating legacy of residential schools—the CBC North Indigenous Language Archives project has been digitizing and indexing radio stories dating back 75 years. These recordings feature interviews, cultural items, music, histories, legends, and traditional knowledge in 10 Indigenous languages.

As early as the 1950s, says Kris Clemens, senior specialist for Indigenous strategy, Indigenous communities were concerned about preserving their languages as the original usages slipped away. CBC archivists knew the hundreds of boxes of audiotapes, kept in the basements of CBC North buildings, needed to be preserved, digitized, and cataloged to ensure access. They also needed to recruit local language speakers who could listen to the tapes and tag them appropriately. CBC Senior Managing Director Mervin Brass estimates that between 30 and 50 people have been part of the team over the years.

The tapes themselves are mainly digitized in Toronto using a media asset management system. Team members, who receive training on how to catalogue the audio, listen to each piece, enter time codes for length, and identify the recordings’ host or reporter. Catalogers also note the name of the speaker, whether they are still alive, which community they are from, and where the piece was recorded. Each is given a title and brief summary, including keywords, taxonomy, and metadata. 

Lucy Ann Yakeleya, a Dene artist who joined the project in 2017, has a background in linguistics, and notes that the language of the older recordings is far richer than what is spoken today. Many Indigenous residents who speak English no longer have full proficiency in their languages, she says. 

As of May, the project has catalogued 48,070 programs and 105,756 stories. The Inuktitut and Dene programming is projected to be completed in 2030 if funding remains steady. “Connecting it to the nations and communities whose languages and cultural knowledge these are, and finding accessible ways to do that, is the critical next step,” says Clemens.

There are, she notes, limitations on sharing. Project leaders are working to ensure that individual Indigenous nations have a say in how their cultural material and ancestral stories are used and that different expectations and protocols are respected while still providing as wide access to the material as possible.

“DECIDING WHAT IS HISTORY”

As Mosley notes, preserving the record means paying attention to who’s not at the table and filling those gaps where possible. 

The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society began as a community-based physical collection in San Francisco in 1985 before expanding online. Over the last 40 years, the GLBT Historical Society has worked to bring together its holdings—more than 1,000 collections, which include personal papers, organizational records, periodicals, oral histories, photographs, audiovisual recordings, ephemera, artifacts, and works of art—with the mission of public programming and education to spread awareness of queer history and battle its erasure and delegitimization.

Yet despite the organization’s very clear focus, collection decisions are always being made, and Molly June Roquet, director of archives and special collections, acknowledges that the archive reflects its own structural bias: white, cisgender gay men. “There’s been a lot of concerted effort over the years to recognize that the community most readily available, that have the most resources, and that are most likely to be in a position to organize and donate and have that orientation to the archives, are not necessarily the only story out there,” says Roquet. It’s an issue that archivists must come to terms with: “having an invisible hand in deciding what is history.” 

Ensuring that metadata takes into account changing norms can also pose a challenge. Roquet takes care to navigate how language about the gay community—from within and outside—has changed over the years. “There’s a particular challenge around identity,” they note. “That’s a constant tension in the work, trying to make history discoverable, accessible, alive, and also not flatten it.”

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

CPL is stepping up its community-based archiving efforts, working with residents to support them in documenting and digitizing their own artifacts to help shape what future collections may look like. Brown plans to hire an archivist with a deep background in engagement with the Latine community.

Mosley is a founding member of the Atlanta Black Archives Alliance, which strives to educate Black communities on the importance of documenting their stories. It was formed in response to the questions he constantly got: How do I preserve my photographs? How do I save my grandmother’s wedding dress? The alliance has done public workshops on best practices for caring for a personal collection, or church or club records. 

When he entered the field, Mosley says, people thought of archives as records of the past, rather than something they can actively contribute to. Recently, however, he’s seen a shift in awareness—helped by Instagram and Facebook—that current events are tomorrow’s history and deserve to be given primacy. 

NOW AND FOR THE FUTURE

The present day holds many challenges for libraries, and archives are feeling the crunch of limited financial, physical, and staff capacity. “We want to be always open to taking things in,” says Mosely, but the library needs to ensure that it can go beyond simply safeguarding material. “You can become a storage site if you only collect, and you’re not actually working on those records that are being brought in.” He is careful to be transparent with donors about how long it will take for items to be catalogued and made discoverable.

At the same time, current concerns have reinforced the importance of preserving the stories of our time. The drive to save what matters, from the historical to the mundane, is evergreen. But the precarity of even those documents that make up the national record, played out in the news cycle, has increased public understanding of the need to keep material safe. 

“One thing we get asked a lot is, how can people think about their own materials and collections?” says Roquet. “We are writing the history books of the future, hopefully, and the record of how we endure this moment, how we survive, how we even find joy in it, is incredibly important. I want to encourage folks to think about their own stories and their own history and collect the things that are meaningful to them and hang on to them, because we’re going to need them in the future to look back at this moment and make sense of it.”