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.

Archiving the Black Web was founded on a commitment to create pathways for underrepresented voices and marginalized communities to access web archiving skills, knowledge, and networks. Our work addresses not only “ensuring equitable access to archived web content,” but also ensuring equitable access to who gets to participate in the practice of web archiving and what gets privileged to be part of a web archive collection. At IIPC WAC 2024, Archiving the Black Web shared details about our project’s efforts to reduce these disparities with the upcoming launch of our fellowship and training program, Warc School. Developed for memory workers dedicated to collecting and preserving Black history and culture online, the fellowship offers web archiving training to enhance their memory work or digital content creation practice. In April 2025, Warc School welcomed 22 fellows representing traditional archives, community-based archives, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, public libraries, and independent scholars and creators to complete our 10-month training program, which includes five courses and a practicum.

In this session, join Archiving the Black Web for a brief update on lessons learned while developing a training program and its curriculum, recruiting fellows and faculty, as well as highlights from student practicum projects. Attendees will also hear about our new initiative to strengthen social sustainability, with details about the launch of our second cohort. This cohort will include fellowship opportunities not only for memory workers but also for journalists at Black newspapers interested in digital preservation through web archiving training. Information integrity and ethical considerations related to artificial intelligence will be incorporated into the 2026 Warc School curriculum.

In Mexico, progress continues to be made in web archiving, which has become a fundamental strategy for preserving digital heritage, especially given the volatile and ephemeral nature of online content. In this context, the Digital Preservation Group of Mexico (GPD) has experimented with an automated web archiving system to capture, store, and preserve digital resources relevant to the country's collective memory. This study focuses on detecting errors during the capture processes and in the strategies applied to ensure the quality of the resulting archives.

Using an empirical-applied approach, combining observation and experimentation to address practical problems, the automated tool Browsertrix (from Webrecorder) was used, along with systematic reviews of the files generated in WARC format. Twenty-four websites were captured in 2025, including catalogs, databases, and repositories. The analysis focused on the frequency, type, and cause of detected errors (e.g., broken links, missing sitemaps, uncaptured dynamic content, JavaScript issues, or multimedia format problems) and the effectiveness of the applied quality control mechanisms.

The results reveal that while automation allows for a significant increase in archiving coverage, it also introduces considerable technical challenges, which we will discuss in the lightning talk. Recurring error patterns were identified, linked to highly dynamic sites with complex structures, highlighting the need for specialized configurations and iterative validation processes. The importance of establishing contextualized quality criteria, beyond purely technical parameters, is also discussed, integrating aspects of cultural, institutional, and legal relevance.

The lightning talk concludes with a series of practical recommendations for similar projects in Latin American contexts, emphasizing the importance of a flexible technical infrastructure, automated monitoring capabilities, and a clear policy for collaborative digital preservation. This work contributes to the development of standards and best practices for institutional web archiving in the region, and opens the door to future research on automated curation and preservation of emerging content such as social networks, alternative media and ephemeral resources.