Increasingly, Library Science and Archives Management programs are offering courses specific to archiving born digital and web content. And Archive-It has been stepping in to play a role. Since 2007, six different graduate level information programs in the U.S. have brought Archive-It into their web archiving curricula. Students are given a 90 minute training with an Archive-It Partner Specialist, and throughout the course the students have the same access to help tools, documentation, and tech support as all other Archive-It partner organizations. How the course is structured and how Archive-it is incorporated is entirely up to the instructor. Some have chosen to work with Archive-It as a semester long project, while others have included the tool in shorter multi-week sections on web archiving. Some programs have offered web archiving only courses, while others have added web archiving components to broader courses like appraisal and selection, the humanities, and digital preservation. A consistent thread is a priority to help students in library and information science or Archives management programs become more proficient in the web archiving process and to give students skills and tools that will help them as they move forward in their career paths.
Here are just a few examples of Archive-It’s use in graduate level information programs
University of Michigan, School of Information
(Image from University of Michigan, School of Information’s Classical Archaeology I collection – 2010)
In 2010, 2011 and 2013 the University of Michigan School of Information used Archive-It as a focal point of their 7-week web archiving course. Students were broken up into groups and were given the task of choosing their own topic or event to cover. In the three years they’ve used Archive-It, students have created 26 collections on subjects like Asian Carp, Famous 19th and 20th century Irish Writers, and Classical Archaeology. You can explore all their collections here http://archive-it.org/organizations/421
University of Maryland, iSchool
(Image from University of Maryland, iSchool’s Urban Farming collection, 2012)
In the fall semester of 2012, Kari Kraus incorporated Archive-It into her Information Access in the Humanities course. She also had students break off into small groups to come up with collections on topics or events of their choice. This class had 7 groups with a total of 72 websites and captured 2 million documents and 1 terabyte of data. Their collections included topics like urban farming and Joss Whedon. Kari has an overview of course up on her blog, you can read it here http://www.karikraus.com/?p=207 and take a look at the collections the students created on their course page http://archive-it.org/organizations/663.
This year we will be conducting educational partnerships with the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill iSchool, and the New York University, Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program. Both schools have used Archive-It in their classrooms in past semesters; UNC focused on appraisal and selection of web content, while NYU worked with subject matter specialists to help create their collections. This fall both instructors will be new to the Archive-It service. We’re looking forward to seeing the direction they take Archive-It in their classes.
The Archive-It Team is always interested hearing about your ideas for using Archive-It in LIS classes. If you’re interested in an educational partnership at your institution please feel free to email Sylvie at Sylvie@archive.org.
We’re also interested to hear more from students or instructors who have used Archive-It in their coursework. If you would like to contribute a blog post about your experience, or just give us some feedback about it please email Scott at Scott@archive.org
