Content uploaded by Kayla Harris
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Kayla Harris on Jan 17, 2022
Content may be subject to copyright.
University of Dayton University of Dayton
eCommons eCommons
Marian Library Faculty Publications The Marian Library
1-4-2022
Citizen Web Archivists: Applying Web Archiving as a Pedagogical Citizen Web Archivists: Applying Web Archiving as a Pedagogical
Tool Tool
Kayla Harris
University of Dayton
, kharris2@udayton.edu
Christina A. Beis
University of Dayton
, cbeis1@udayton.edu
Stephanie Shre=er
University of Dayton
, sshre=er1@udayton.edu
Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.udayton.edu/imri_faculty_publications
Part of the Archival Science Commons, Cataloging and Metadata Commons, and the Collection
Development and Management Commons
eCommons Citation eCommons Citation
Kayla Harris (0000-0002-1672-3022), Christina A. Beis (0000-0003-4749-1292), and Stephanie Shre=er
(0000-0002-2147-7495) (2022). Citizen Web Archivists: Applying Web Archiving as a Pedagogical Tool.
Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship
. ,
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/imri_faculty_publications/59
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the The Marian Library at eCommons. It has been
accepted for inclusion in Marian Library Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of eCommons. For
more information, please contact mschlangen1@udayton.edu, ecommons@udayton.edu.
Citizen Web Archivists: Applying Web Archiving as a Pedagogical Tool
Kayla Harris
0000-0002-1672-3022
Librarian / Archivist, Marian Library
Associate Professor
University of Dayton
Christina A. Beis
0000-0003-4749-1292
Director of Collections, Strategies, and Services
Associate Professor
University of Dayton
Stephanie Shreffler
0000-0002-2147-7495
Collections Librarian / Archivist
Associate Professor
University of Dayton
Abstract
Librarians and archivists preserve information on the Internet through web archiving, but
undergraduate students may not have considered that information on the Internet is not
always permanent. The asynchronous program, Citizen Web Archiving: Preserving
Websites for the Common Good, taught students what web archiving is, why it’s
important, the ethics of collecting information on the Internet, and how they could
contribute to the historical record by archiving websites they deemed important via the
Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The results suggest further opportunities for
involving undergraduate students with web archiving initiatives at institutions, and using
web archiving as a pedagogical tool.
Keywords
Web archiving, citizen archivists, undergraduate students, asynchronous instruction,
programming, Internet Archive, Wayback Machine, LibWizard, civic engagement
Introduction
Increasingly, information that was once available in print is now available only online. While
librarians and archivists preserve some of this information through web archiving, the process of
selecting, capturing, and making accessible content from the web, undergraduate students may
not have considered that everything on the Internet does not always persist, and that preservation
requires a proactive approach. As a co-curricular learning opportunity, a team of librarians and
archivists created a self-guided, asynchronous program, Citizen Web Archiving: Preserving
Websites for the Common Good, in order to teach students what web archiving is, why it’s
important, and the related ethics of collecting information on the Internet. By using the
LibWizard platform, a variety of videos, readings, and questions were shared, citing
contemporary examples of web archiving and explaining efforts to document different aspects of
American culture and social justice movements, as well as the web archive collections curated by
the University Libraries at the University of Dayton (UD). Through a final activity and reflection
to archive a website for the common good, students gained a new understanding of the Internet’s
impermanence and the knowledge to pursue citizen web archiving.
Institutional web archiving initiatives
The University Libraries has been using Archive-It, a subscription-based service from the
Internet Archive, since 2015 to capture websites and social media that fits within the collecting
scope of the three special collection areas. Cultural heritage institutions use Archive-It to harvest,
organize, and catalog their collection material. The University Libraries has been expanding their
use of Archive-It by involving student employees in the process. In addition to utilizing student
employees to expand the metadata for individual seeds (URLs), the Marian Library also
developed a project on web archiving for an OhioLINK Luminaries student intern during Fall
2020. The OhioLINK Luminaries Program (formerly named Library Leaders) is a program
piloted by several OhioLINK member libraries to provide a paid internship experience to rotate
through different units in the libraries. During a rotation in the Marian Library, the intern, a
senior history major, was introduced to the concept of web archiving through readings, tutorials,
and tasks with the Archive-It collections. During check-in meetings and in a post-internship
interview, the intern expressed surprise at the Internet’s impermanence, stating, “all my life,
everyone always told me to be careful what you put on the Internet because it will never be
erased; it will be there forever. Now, I learned that isn’t completely true” (Harris, 2021).
Connecting the expanding use of web archiving at the University of Dayton and a
perceived gap in student knowledge on the subject, the archivists from the Marian Library and
the U.S. Catholic Special Collection, with the Discovery Services Librarian, envisioned a
program for undergraduate students that introduced the basic issues of web archiving and
crowdsourced actual web archiving.
Co-curricular learning through AVIATE at the University of Dayton
The University of Dayton is a Catholic, medium-sized, private institution, located in Dayton,
Ohio. In the Marianist tradition, the University is committed to educating the whole person and
linking learning and scholarship with leadership and service. Living in community is especially
valued on the residential campus, and UD aims to integrate classroom experiences with co-
curricular learning opportunities. One of these opportunities that is especially popular with
students is offered by UD’s Department of Housing and Residence Life. AVIATE, an acronym
that stands for A Vision for Integrated, Applied, and Transformative Education, is a program that
integrates the department’s residential curriculum with the housing assignment process. Students
participate in programs offered by Housing and Residence Life, as well as campus partners, and
are awarded PATH, Points Accumulated Toward Housing. Each PATH-eligible opportunity
must connect to one of the program’s identified learning goals of authorship, interculturalism, or
community learning, and the number of PATH credits that a student has determines the priority
they will be given to attain their desired housing.
The University Libraries has been a successful campus partner in the AVIATE program
since its formation, offering many different sessions on topics ranging from book reads to
programs on financial literacy. While many of the University Libraries PATH-eligible programs
have high attendance, the special collections units have traditionally offered smaller sessions
with an attendance cap, and used them to provide hands-on learning with primary source
materials. Previous sessions offered have included for example, “Sacred Sights: Exploring
Archival Postcards,” that introduced students to concepts of visual literacy and connected to the
AVIATE learning goal of interculturalism; and “Community Collections: Exploring Archives at
UD,” focusing on the shapes and structures that communities can take while also helping
students navigate a finding aid.
In the summer of 2020 the Department of Housing and Residence Life announced that
the AVIATE program would continue during the 2020-2021 academic year, but that all events
for PATH credit must be virtual. It was up to campus partners to determine how they chose to
offer events, whether as live sessions in a platform such as Zoom, or as asynchronous learning
opportunities. The experience with the remote web archiving project for the OhioLINK intern
and the intern’s own reflections on web archiving prompted the development of the PATH-
eligible program, Citizen Web Archiving: Preserving Websites for the Common Good.
Literature review
There are many examples of “citizen archivist” or crowdsourcing efforts to involve community
members in the archival profession. The Citizen Archivist program at the National Archives
involves interested volunteers with tagging, transcribing, and commenting on digitized objects.
During nationwide lockdowns in spring 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, they saw triple
their normal amount of contributions with some people finding themselves with more free time
to contribute (Macchi, 2020).
The Community Web project, a two-year grant project, enabled public libraries to create
web archives that captured content related to their local communities. As part of this project, the
Queens Memory Program of the Queens Borough Public Library developed customized
workshops on web archiving for three audiences: MLIS candidates, middle and high school
students, and cultural heritage professionals. The Program asked the middle and high school
students and the cultural heritage professionals to contribute ideas for websites to include in the
project (Milbrodt et. al, 2018). The Library of Congress’ K-12 Web Archiving project also
introduced students to web archiving. Starting in 2008, the project allowed students across the
country to gain hands-on experience with selecting, capturing, and describing web content. J.
Freeman commented that for these students, “the actual process of web archiving may be just as
important as the collection created from it,” as the program “empowers students to redefine their
understanding of history, cultural expression, and personal identity” (Freeman, 2016).
As described above, there have been some efforts at introducing younger students and the
public about web archiving. Additionally, a variety of courses have taught undergraduate
students about basic archival principles (See, for example, Stringfellow, 2019; Roff, 2007; Duff
& Cherry, 2008; Krause, 2010). The literature contains far fewer examples of efforts to teach
web archiving to undergraduate students in colleges and universities or to the general public.
One such example was led by Andrea Schuler (2017) at Tufts University, who worked with
undergraduates to preserve websites documenting environmental justice. For this project, Schuler
worked collaboratively with two courses and students were asked to submit recommendations on
the specific theme of environmental justice to the library for evaluation and possible inclusion in
the institutional web archive collections.
A presentation at DigCCurr seemed to indicate the possibilities of educating the general
public about web archiving, stating that “outside the context of professional curation, private
individuals have the potential to contribute substantially to social memory, by informing,
contributing to, and initiating web archiving activities” (Bragg et. al, 2009). They suggest that in
order to cultivate “citizen web archiving,” information professionals should provide
opportunities for training and hands-on experience with available tools. Much of the literature
that discusses web archiving, does so from an institutional perspective. Peter Webster (2017)
notes that an important strand of web archiving activity that tends to be overlooked is the work
of individuals and small groups responding to a particular cause. In describing two examples of
this type of activist web archiving, he explains that, “both ventures were motivated by a sense of
public duty, and a particular political and social vision of the kind of space that the web should
be.”
Methods
The Citizen Web Archiving program (https://udayton.libwizard.com/f/citizen_web_archiving),
was created with three main learning goals: teaching students about the process of web
archiving, introducing them to the web archive collections curated by the University Libraries,
and instilling within them the importance of preserving history on the Internet. The culminating
activity was a virtual-version of a “hands-on” activity where the students served as citizen
archivists and archived a web page for the common good. By connecting this program to the
AVIATE program’s “community living” learning goal, students learned that taking pride in
one’s community extends to space on the Internet, and that ensuring different viewpoints are
represented in the historical record is the responsibility of everyone in the community.
Due to the asynchronous nature of the AVIATE program and the goal to share a mix of
videos, recent news articles, and scholarly research, Springshare’s LibWizard platform was
selected as the tool to host the program. Although the Libraries had licensed LibWizard for a few
years, it was not used broadly until the COVID-19 pandemic moved all courses and library
instruction to an online format in March 2020. With the recent hire of a new Health & Life
Sciences Librarian with responsibilities for managing LibWizard, library faculty were
encouraged to use the product in new ways, and he provided support and instruction on potential
opportunities to use it. The tutorial option was selected as it provided a self-guided learning
experience with convenient features on both the administrative and user side. LibWizard tutorials
function similarly to Guide on the Side, a tool developed by the University of Arkansas libraries
(Sherriff, 2017). A website, video, or other media is shown on one side of the screen, while
instructions and questions can be presented on the other side. The Citizen Web Archiving
program used videos, websites, and documents as the media presented to students, and a mix of
multiple choice, true/false, and open-ended response as formative assessment to check for
student understanding throughout. Several library colleagues and student employees served as
beta testers of the program, completing the tutorial in advance of its launch to provide feedback
on the function of the program, the difficulty of the questions, and an estimated length of time to
complete the tutorial (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Screen capture of the Citizen Web Archiving program, showing the side-by-side layout
in LibWizard. Image provided by the authors.
Program content
In addition to foundational information about what web archiving is, and why it’s important, the
program also included a section on its challenges and potential ethical considerations. Students
were introduced and given examples for five main types or purposes of web archiving, including
social justice issues, government accountability, institutional websites, social media, and niche
interests. With COVID-19 and the civic unrest experienced throughout the United States after the
death of George Floyd in May 2020, there were many recent news stories about efforts from both
archivists and citizens to archive these historic moments on the Internet. One example shared in
the program was a news story about a grant-funded project in Florida, led by Makiba Foster,
titled “Archiving the Black Web: A National Forum to Map the Landscape, Define the Issues,
and Plan a Strategy for Documenting the Black Experience Online.” In describing the
importance of web archiving Black culture on the Internet, Foster states, “I am benefiting from
the labor of people I never knew, and this kind of work will hopefully benefit people that I will
never know. It is a way of paying it forward, in terms of Black culture and that it is documented
in this new digital space.” (Crandell, 2021).
To counter a common solution to just “archive everything,” students read a selection
from an editorial article on the ethics of web archiving. In the instructions for that section,
students were prompted to think about privacy and permission. The instructions in the program
stated, “should archivists seek out permission from a web site owner before crawling it and
saving it to a web archive? By capturing a website or a piece of social media, we are
perpetuating that content in ways that the original owner or creator may not have intended. From
that perspective, seeking permission should always be attempted. On the other hand, it’s often
unclear who created a website, or how to get in touch with them. Even if you can identify the
creator or owner, again, the sheer size of the Internet can make seeking permission for each piece
of web content seem like an impossible task.” This prompted students to think more critically
about the information on the Internet and which types of materials archivists should be
attempting to archive.
The final activity of the program asked students to serve as a citizen archivist and archive
a website for the “common good.” At the University of Dayton, the idea of the common good is
built into the collective community identity, and is a key concept of the university’s vision,
introduced by President Eric F. Spina (The University for the Common Good, n.d.). Although the
definition of “common good” is broad, it is an idea that undergraduates at the University of
Dayton are familiar with. The program planners intentionally chose not to include any further
instruction about the types of web pages that individuals should archive, as a central theme in the
program was that individuals and communities have unique viewpoints that are not always
present in the historical record.
A narrated screencast video walked participants through the process of archiving a
webpage using the Internet Archive’s “Save Page Now” function. There are several exceptions to
what can be archived with this feature, and those were explained to students in the video. For
example, although the program highlighted instances of entire websites being archived by
cultural heritage institutions using Archive-It or other tools, the Save Page Now feature only
archives a single website page. This is the difference between archiving a single news story from
the New York Times versus the entire New York Times website. Other websites specifically
prevent web crawlers from archiving their webpage.
Participants were asked, “What website did you choose to archive?” when submitting
their final reflection. In hindsight, this direction could have been clearer as individuals submitted
their answers in a variety of ways, such as the archived URL in the Wayback Machine, the
original URL, or a general description of the website they chose. It would have been easier to
determine if students had successfully completed this task if they were asked to submit the
Wayback Machine’s archived URL. However, the program planners felt that the student’s
reflection on the program was more important than whether or not the web page was archived.
Periodically the Wayback Machine is unavailable due to system upgrades, or slow servers, so the
actual archiving was seen as a secondary outcome.
The reflection asked students to elaborate on why they felt it was important to archive the
particular website page they chose. They were also asked whether they thought it was important
for the general public to actively archive websites and their reasoning for why or why not. At the
conclusion of the tutorial, participants received a certificate acknowledging that they were
officially citizen web archivists and a full list of references to material used throughout the
program for further study.
Results
The online program was open to students seeking PATH credit from October 19, 2020 to
November 19, 2020 and in that time 1,343 students participated, nearly 15% of UD’s
undergraduate population. Within just the first day of opening, over 100 students completed the
program. The program was advertised through a digital sign in the library, a blog post on the
library website, and through the library’s social media channels, Facebook, Instagram and
Twitter. It was also emailed directly to library employees who were encouraged to take the
program themselves as professional development or to share with others. One partnership
developed when the University Libraries liaison to the History Department shared the program
with a faculty member, seeing a connection to an assignment that students had been given to
become citizen archivists at the National Archives. The program was copied in LibWizard and
customized with reflection questions that connected the two experiences, and twenty-five
students completed this version of the program. Externally, the marketing graphics were shared
with the University’s Human Rights Center and Alumni Relations and the program was featured
in the weekly AVIATE emails advertising PATH-eligible opportunities.
Throughout the program, participants were required to answer several true/false or
multiple-choice questions. When an incorrect answer was selected, participants were directed to
try again, sometimes with specific clues as to what they needed to review before answering. In
this way, the true/false and multiple-choice questions served as formative assessment throughout
the program. All of these questions required a correct answer before a participant could proceed
to the next slide. However, the LibWizard tutorial program records the answer and statistics for a
user’s first attempt only. This means that the participants received feedback and clues they
needed to learn the correct answer, while the program creators also gained valuable insight into
which questions users struggled with (Table 1).
Formative Assessment Questions
Percentage correct
on first attempt
1. True / False: In the Digital Era, websites are comparable to scrolls in
earlier time periods, as the method of capturing cultural history and
historical events
98.80%
2. True / False: A US Court of Appeals decided that the Wayback
Machine’s archive of webpages is NOT legitimate evidence that may be
used in litigation.
82.30%
3. True / False: Web archiving can only be done by libraries or archives,
not by other organizations or individuals.
85.80%
4. Multiple Choice: What is the mission of libraries, museums, and
archives, according to this article?
96.60%
5. Yes / No: Does this mission also apply to web archives?
98.40%
6. Multiple Choice: What organization from UD did we archive a blog
post from in the video?
91.90%
Overall Average
92.30%
Table 1. Statistics for formative assessment questions throughout program
The overall average score for the six multiple choice questions was 92.3%, and every
question had a correct response rate above 80%. The final task of the program instructed students
to choose a website that they felt should be archived due to its impact on the common good, and
a review of the websites provided insight into how students think about, or define this idea.
The archived websites were classified into 10 categories based on subject area and theme.
Although some websites could reasonably fit into multiple areas, each one was classified in one
category only. The categories were selected by identifying trends in the content of websites that
were archived. The categories included: Activism, Dayton, Education, Environment,
Government, Health, News, Pop Culture, Religious, and Other. Overall, 20% of students
archived a website that was classified as “Activism” (See Figure 2). Examples of “Activism”
websites included organization and non-profit websites such as the People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals (PETA), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In reviewing the “Activism” sites,
49% were related to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The frequency of BLM-related
websites can be attributed to the timing of the online program, with the murders of George Floyd
and Breonna Taylor among others, along with nationwide protests that brought the BLM
movement to the forefront.
The next highest category of archived websites was “Religious,” with 16.8%. As a
Catholic and Marianist institution, founded by the Society of Mary, it was logical that students
would archive religious websites, such as an encyclical by Pope Francis, local parish websites,
and the Hope Border Institute, an organization that brings Catholic social teaching to the United
States and Mexico border region. Students may also have thought specifically about religious
websites as a section of the program introduced students to the University Libraries Archive-It
collections, including those from the U.S. Catholic Special Collection and the Marian Library,
which are primarily religious in nature. The “News” category was the third highest, with 15.2%,
and represented a wide range of interests including, climate change, the 2020 presidential
election, police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Figure 2. Categorization of website pages students chose to archive for the common good.
In addition to selecting and archiving a website page, students had to reflect upon why
they chose a particular website, why they felt it should be archived, and whether or not they felt
that the general public should be involved with web archiving. The reflection was an important
component to demonstrating that students had met the AVIATE program’s learning goal of
community living. As a form of summative assessment, these questions, particularly on why a
participant felt it was important to have an archived copy of the website that they chose, was
what was used to determine if PATH credit was issued (Table 2).
Summative Assessment Questions
What website did you choose to archive?
Why do you feel that it is important to have an archived copy of this website? Please share 2-3
sentences to receive PATH credit.
Yes / No: Do you think that it is important for the general public to actively archive websites?
Why or Why Not?
Table 2. Summative assessment and reflection questions at the conclusion of the program.
For the question of whether it is important for the general public to actively archive
websites, 97.5% of respondents said “yes.” Some of the justification included allowing everyone
to take part in history, providing different perspectives, and the ability to hold people and
organizations accountable for their actions. A very small percentage, 0.6% selected both “yes”
and “no” as they had not quite made up their minds. One respondent explained, “I think it would
be good for everyone to participate in the archiving so they understand its significance, but that
may cause the archive to be filled with useless or even inappropriate information. That could
cause the important information to become overpowered.” Of the respondents who selected “no,”
approximately 1.9%, some of their reasoning indicated the lack of expertise from the general
public and similar concerns as above about too much information being saved that isn’t deemed
valuable. One respondent explained, “This is supposed to be a way of retrieving information and
that information needs to be credible, so if it was open to the general public it might not be facts
that are kept.” This type of comment is particularly worrisome as it seems to indicate that the
respondent views all information that is archived by cultural heritage institutions as a fact.
Therefore, there is a need to more clearly define the role of information professionals and the
types of materials that are collected and archived.
Discussion
There was an optional space for students to provide feedback about what they liked, learned, or
would like to see next time, as a way for the University Libraries to plan future AVIATE
sessions or other programming. Those who did choose to leave a comment, about 69% of total
participants, were positive in their assessment. The feedback itself focused both on content and
the modality of the program - the interactivity, the mixture of different media to accommodate
different learning styles. Some of the modality comments included:
• “I really liked that some of the videos were interactive and had questions and that
you weren't just watching 5 videos for an hour.”
• “I thought the way the information was presented was cool. Especially embedding
the websites and videos directly here avoided it being a hassle.”
• “I thought the mix of videos to articles was a good mix. I learned something without
feeling like I was being tested.”
• I really liked the videos, and how there were interactive questions on the slides. It
really helped me focus and pay attention.
This feedback indicates that students were engaged with the content from different media forms.
Many comments called attention to the fact that the program concluded with the “hands-on”
activity of archiving a webpage using the Save Page Now tool of the Wayback Machine:
• “I definitely liked the interactive component of getting to archive a website myself--
that was pretty cool!”
• “I thought it was interesting that you can archive things online, no matter who you
are.”
• “I like archiving the website because it made me feel like I was doing something
permanent which was fun.”
• “I liked the interactive aspect of archiving my own website! It made me feel very
involved instead of just a spectator to the information.”
These comments indicated that for at least some students, this online program had successfully
replicated the learning experience of “hands-on” activities that make the physical sessions so
successful. Finally, a large amount of comments mentioned how the program introduced them to
a topic that they did not know existed, and several mentioned plans for utilizing this tool on their
own in the future.
● “Not only did I learn that a webpage can actually be archived, but I also (obviously) learned
how to do it. I really enjoyed the videos and links that were provided throughout the
sessions, because it was interesting to see how they relate to archives.”
● “This was so neat!!! I had no idea this even existed but now I am probably gonna go mess
around with it more.”
● “I liked being able to do something practical. That is, I was shown how to and did archive a
webpage, which could have an impact.”
● “I think this is important as each person is interested in different things, and so the websites
archived by institutions will be different from the websites archived by the general public.”
These comments in particular, highlight the potential for further research on this topic. The
program was conceived based on the perceptions of the Internet from one student intern. A future
avenue of study is to look more broadly at the perceptions of the Internet and web archiving from
current undergraduate students. The topic of citizen web archiving can foster collaboration for
programming, instruction, and collection development across units in the library. There is a
connection to information literacy instruction about evaluating sources, since students may not
be aware that some potential sources of information on the Internet may already be lost. This
also connects to the Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy (2019), developed by the Society of
American Archivists (SAA) and the Rare Book and Manuscript Section (RBMS) section of the
Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). Learning objective 2.D from these
guidelines recommends that users of primary sources will, “understand that historical records
may never have existed, may not have survived, or may not be collected and/or publicly
accessible. Existing records may have been shaped by the selectivity and mediation of
individuals such as collectors, archivists, librarians, donors, and/or publishers, potentially
limiting the sources available for research.” This objective can be taught for both physical and
digital materials, with web archiving being one way to look at the selectivity and mediation of
sources available to future researchers.
The Citizen Web Archiving program did not ask students to share their grade level,
though most programs generally attract a large number of underclassmen due to their need for
housing priority. The AVIATE report for the 2020-2021 year indicated that out of 5,075 total
participants in AVIATE programs, 64% were in their first or second year. If this program, or an
advanced program on the topic, is offered in the future, the program planners would collect more
demographic data about the students to inform library instruction.
These results also indicate an opportunity to further involve students, either as student
employees or more broadly, in institutional efforts to collect web content using Archive-It. While
the directions to archive a website supporting the common good are very open-ended, more
targeted instruction could be provided about the University Libraries’ web archiving program,
and what types of websites are within the collecting scope of the three special collection units.
This would be a valuable way to increase the diversity of material curated in the collections and
enable students to feel invested in the web archive collections as a library resource.
The Citizen Web Archiving program also supported one of the University of Dayton’s
institutional learning goals, “Critical evaluation of our times” which indicates that undergraduate
students will be prepared to “evaluate critically and imaginatively the ethical, historical, social,
political, technological, economic, and ecological challenges of their times in light of the past”
(Assessment for Student Learning, n.d.). The readings and videos presented in the tutorial
provided historical, social, and ethical context that was thought-provoking and informative. The
reflection question and activity developed participant’s skills of inquiry, while giving them the
freedom of choice to pursue their own interests when selecting a website to archive.
Conclusion
As librarians and archivists continue to pursue web archiving as a form of collection
development and preservation, the results and lessons learned from the Citizen Web Archiving
program highlight many possibilities for using web archiving as a pedagogical tool. Other web
archiving tools exist, such as Confier, formerly named Webrecorder. In Conifer, users can
register for a free account with a limited storage capacity. However, what made the Internet
Archive’s Wayback Machine so useful for this program is the idea of a collective responsibility
to contribute to one data archive. Learning about web archiving helps students understand that
the records created online today, are the historical record for tomorrow. It allows them to see
how the records they create - from social media posts to blogs for their student groups - have
value and document their particular viewpoints and voice. Citizen web archiving also reinforces
the idea of civic responsibility to ensure a diverse historical record. Through this co-curricular
learning opportunity, students learned why everyone, not just librarians and archivists, should be
invested in preserving records for the future.
References
Bragg, M., Fox, E., Hedstrom, M., & Lee, C. (2009). Moving web archiving into the classroom.
Proceedings of DigCCurr2009: Digital Curation: Practice, Promise & Prospects. (Helen
R. Tibbo, Carolyn Hank, Christopher A. Lee, & Rachael Clemens, Eds.).
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.164.54&rep=rep1&type=pdf#
page=124
Crandell, B. (2020, August 8). In Fort Lauderdale, an historic effort to archive Black digital lives
begins. South Florida Sun Sentinel. https://www.sun-sentinel.com/entertainment/theater-
and-arts/books/fl-et-black-web-archive-makiba-foster-fort-lauderdale-20200808-
ka35jtoswjbchmxkzvb3qeqzza-story.html
Duff, W. & Cherry, J. (Fall/Winter 2008). Archival orientation for undergraduate students: An
exploratory study of impact. The American Archivist 71(2), 499-529.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40294528
Freeman, J. (2016). Seen but Not Heard: A Case Study of K–12 Web Archiving and the
Importance of Student Participation in the Archives. Archival Issues, 37(2), Article 2.
https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/archivalissues/article/id/11015/
Harris, K. (October 14, 2020). A Conversation with Maleah Wells, OhioLINK Library Leaders
Intern. The Marian Library Blog. Retrieved June 21, 2021, from
https://udayton.edu/blogs/libraries/2020-10-14-maleah-kayla.php
Krause, M. (2010). ‘It makes history alive for them’: The role of archivists and special
collections librarians in instructing undergraduates. The Journal of Academic
Librarianship 36(5), 401-411. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2010.06.004
Macchi, V. (2020, April 22). Citizen Archivists Triple Contributions to National Archives
Catalog During Pandemic. National Archives.
https://www.archives.gov/news/articles/citizen-archivists-triple-contributions
Milbrodt, N., Ward, E., & Blumenthal, K.-R. (2018). Curators Needed: How Public Libraries
are Bringing Community Members into their Web Archiving Practice. LIS Scholarship
Archive. https://doi.org/10.31229/osf.io/pr9hc
Roff, S. (2007). Archives, documents, and hidden history: A course to teach undergraduates the
thrill of historical discovery real and virtual. History Teacher 40(4), 551-558.
https://doi.org/10.2307/30037050
SAA-ACRL/RBMS Joint Task Force on the Development of Guidelines for Primary Source
Literacy. (2018). Guidelines for primary source literacy.
https://www2.archivists.org/standards/guidelines-for-primary-source-literacy
Schuler, A. (2017). Collection & community building through web archiving: Engaging with
faculty and students in a collaborative web archiving project. Digital Initiatives
Symposium. https://digital.sandiego.edu/symposium/2017/2017/2
Sherriff, G. (2017). Guide on the Side and LibWizard Tutorials Side-By-Side: How Do the Two
Platforms for Split-Screen Online Tutorials Compare? Journal of Web Librarianship,
11(2), 124–142. https://doi.org/10.1080/19322909.2017.1295821
Stringfellow, J. (2019). Teaching an introduction to archives course to undergraduates: A new
experience for the archivist and the students. Journal of Western Archives, 10(2), Article
8. https://doi.org/10.26077/f221-ac6e
University of Dayton. (n.d.) Assessment for Student Learning at the University of Dayton.
Retrieved June 21, 2021, from https://udayton.edu/provost/assessment/index.php
University of Dayton. (n.d.). The University for the Common Good. (n.d.). Retrieved June 21,
2021, from https://udayton.edu/vision/stories/index.php
Webster, P. (2017). Users, technologies, organisations: Towards a cultural history of world web
archiving. In Niels Brügger (Ed.), Web 25. Histories from 25 Years of the World Wide
Web, 179–190. https://doi.org/10.3726/b11492
