Conference Agenda

Web preservation is a contemporary practice that began this century. Like many practices, promoting and supporting web archiving has been challenging due to limited time and resources. However, the urgency and ephemeral nature of online content have made the gap between countries that have adopted web archiving initiatives and those still unaware of its importance increasingly clear, highlighting the pressing need for action.

In Latin America, web archiving is an archival medium technique that has been rarely applied. Formal web archiving projects are known to exist in Chile and Mexico, though communities and other organizations have also made significant contributions. Many have attempted to archive the web using the limited support, resources, and documentation available from both within the web archiving community and their own local contexts.

For this reason, a Spanish-language web archiving training program is being developed within the Library and Information Research Institute (IIBI) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), with the goal of preparing new generations of archivists who can identify, preserve, and provide access to web pages of social, archival, and political value. The program is being developed internally within the IIBI department to evaluate workflows, logic, and vocabulary, with the goal of expanding and disseminating these resources as part of the cultural heritage of our countries and communities.

This panel proposes a training and professional development program, designed as a collaborative strategy between the public university of UNAM from Mexico and open-source tools. As the program is being developed, we invite the broader web archiving community to join the conversation and share insights on how they would have liked to begin their own journeys, offering input that can help shape a more accessible and impactful initiative.

This presentation will describe a collaborative web archiving project funded by the Mellon Foundation (2020-present) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2023-2025). It employs the decolonial practice of post-custodial archiving to record stories of mutual aid organizations and individuals responding to disasters that have impacted Puerto Rico in the last five years, including hurricanes, earthquakes, and COVID-19. Over the course of two weeks in September 2017, Puerto Rico was impacted by a category 5 and a category 4 hurricane, Hurricanes Irma and María. The disaster, however, was not simply the hurricanes but also the events that followed. Notably, the disaster-response methods used—prioritization of urban centers, slow distribution of resources, and strains to infrastructure—placed Puerto Rico under duress by leaving most people to fend for themselves. As a result, Puerto Ricans' survival largely depended upon community-based groups and their use of local traditions, oral knowledge, and community organizing. Our team works with these community organizations to preserve and archive their stories.

We are committed to decolonial web archiving practices that build reciprocal relationships with and for our communities. Linda Tuhiwai Smith asserts that “the intellectual project of decolonizing has to set out ways to proceed through a colonizing world. It needs a radical compassion that reaches out, that seeks collaboration, and that is open to possibilities that can only be imagined as other things fall into place.” For our team, decolonial praxis is defined as “rejecting extractive forms of knowledge acquisition by relegating authority and control of collection processes, material selection, and dissemination strategies to the participating community organizations.” This approach includes adherence to the CARE principles–collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics.

One way we live out these values is through participatory, user-centric design of not only the project’s collections but also the platform in which they are housed. In particular, AREPR has developed a multilingual open source Omeka S theme that is freely available for other groups to use. This theme and the corresponding Omeka S modules that we produced simplify the process of developing and sustaining multilingual projects by providing free, easy-to-use tools for displaying archival materials across languages. Using these software extensions, we built a collection of over 800 bilingual disaster response artifacts and oral histories. We also work with our community partners to sustain these tools via training, documentation, and knowledge transfer.

This presentation will describe how our team put its values into praxis through participatory design of both the project’s collections and the platform in which they are housed. Offering an exciting case study for how to utilize and sustain these innovative software extensions, it will demonstrate how CARE approaches to archiving and tool development make it possible to engage in collaborative and mutually beneficial knowledge production. While this presentation uses our project as a case study, it also draws attention to how web archiving practices can be reimagined to create new opportunities for community engagement and sustainable praxis.

Approaches towards archiving digital Islam presents the experience of the "Digital Islam Across Europe" project, in which digital archiving constitutes a core methodological component. The presentation explores how data were selected, archived, and visualised by teams of academic specialists. Although the team possessed technical competence and general awareness of computer technologies, none had specific expertise in digital archiving. The presentation will therefore illustrate the team’s experiences including processes of experimentation and trial and error. The project’s focus on archiving prompted a steep and ongoing learning curve aimed at developing sustainable, narrated, and open-source digital archives that capture multiple dimensions of digital Muslim expression. Sustainability and accessibility have been integrated into the project’s design through the use of tools provided by Archive-It and ARCH. In doing so, the team seeks to establish good practices that are transferable to other disciplines and to encourage similar projects based on the methodological frameworks developed through this work. This initiative represents one of the earliest systematic efforts to archive religious expression, identities, and related issues specifically those associated with Muslim communities and Islam through multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches informed by the diverse expertise of the participating teams.

"Digital Islam Across Europe: Understanding Muslims’ Participation in Online Islamic Environments" (DigitIslam) examines the social and religious impact of Online Islamic Environments (OIEs) on Europe’s diverse Muslim communities. The project is funded by the Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe (CHANSE) and involves research teams working across five European countries: the United Kingdom, Poland, Sweden, Spain, and Lithuania, with the University of Edinburgh serving as the lead institution. The archives draw on specific contextual Muslim interests reflecting national concerns within the partner countries, while also highlighting transnational networks and shared themes. Each country team contributed subject-specific expertise, particularly in the development of metadata. The content was translated into the respective partner languages, which required refinements to the archiving tools. Although DigitIslam’s archives remain under development, they already constitute a significant research resource at a critical juncture in the study of European Muslim life and digital engagement.

Online: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/digitalislameurope/ X: @digitislam Bluesky: @digitislam.bsky.social Facebook: Chanse DigitIslam