International Internet Preservation Consortium Web Archiving Conference (IIPC)
A Conceptual Model of Decentralized Storage for Community-Based Archives
Zakiya Collier, Jon Voss, Bergis Jules

Community-based archives hold some of the most valuable materials documenting the lives of marginalized people and they mostly exist independently of other traditional academic or government-run cultural heritage institutions. But while these archives continue to collect and preserve these histories, many of them face difficulties growing their operations, keeping their doors open, and enhancing their programming and collections activities because of a lack of funding opportunities and other ongoing resources common in larger institutions.

Beginning in 2023, Shift Collective began a three-year collaborative research and development project to develop use cases for a decentralized storage solution, and an ethical framework for engaging in this quickly developing technology.

With an eight-person research faculty and technical advisors, the first year of the project was dedicated to exploring the ethical, cultural, and technical needs of small cultural memory organizations that steward the most important historical collections for diverse communities around the world—including but not limited to precarious and hyperlocalized web archived content. In the first year, we focused on exploring affordable and sustainable digital storage and how a decentralized storage network might address particular stated needs for the tens of thousands of these organizations.

In the second year, the team is focused on designing a conceptual model for community-centered, non-extractive, affordable, and accessible long-term storage, using the Historypin platform as the front-end interface. The model suggests ways for larger, better-resourced cultural memory institutions to provide low to no-cost digital storage solutions for small organizations without extracting or removing digital assets, transferring ownership, dictating access terms, or even requiring access to community-owned collections at all.

This presentation will share our research to date and highlight the broader implications for the field.

Archiving The Black Web Research & Access In Context - An Update
Zakiya Collier, Bergis Jules, Makiba Foster

Archiving the Black Web (ATBW) WARC School is a web archiving training program for memory workers affiliated with Black collecting community archives, public libraries, and HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). The WARC School is set to launch in fall 2024 with the intention of educating and training current LIS professionals and community-based memory workers to not only become builders but also future users of web archives that focus on Black culture. Placing our training program within the constellation of efforts to understand what exactly is “The Black Web,” we, as web archivists and memory workers, are collaborating with humanists and social scientists in researching and mapping The Black Web from experience and theory to web archive practice. In this talk, ATBW will share information about our strategy to develop web archiving training curriculum within the context of building web archive collections that center Black digital content. In our discussion of the research project, we will share how the scholarship contextualizes Black people and their experiences within the larger world wide web and thereby informs our work in training people to create the web archives related to Black history and culture.