Web Archives

What is Web Archiving?

According to the Society of American Archivists, web archiving is “the process of collecting, preserving and providing, enduring access to web content.”
Since the 1990s, both institutions and individuals started to shift information that would have been disseminated physically to disseminating it online.

What does that mean?

Think about the ways in which students, staff, and faculty interact with information at the University of Illinois. Club event dates, meeting minutes, course syllabi- before the Internet, this information would be given to them on paper, through newsletters, or by word of mouth.
That information now not only lives on computers, but was created on computers. That’s what it means for content to be born-digital. Once that information has been created on a computer or smartphone, it is:

  • uploaded to a social media page such as Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, or Bluesky,
  • placed on a conventional website such as a blog,
  • sent as an email,
  • or sent on a messaging platform such as Discord, Telegram, GroupMe, or Signal.

What happens when that organization changes leadership? When they run out of site or cloud storage? Though much of the information disseminated on websites is only temporarily needed by the campus organizations that create it, it is crucially important to many other groups, including researchers and historians studying campus life. If it is not archived, it is highly likely to be lost without warning, forever.
The average website only lasts for 2 years and 7 months, and that does not consider changes that happen to the site (Beis, 2021). The ephemerality of websites- their impermanent and ever-changing nature- is why they need to be actively preserved. Web archives are, and will continue to be, vital for anyone interested in studying any events, culture, or people from the 1990s to the current year and beyond. 

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