e see you. We believe that your work has enduring value

[Mostafa044]

Local residents, some of whom are themselves transplants from New Orleans, are serious about their Carnival traditions. We currently capture the websites of some of our main Krewes, groups that spend most of the year planning parades and balls during Carnival season, and curate local news articles capturing the history of these treasured events. We hope to continue preserving this local tradition for future generations through digitizing physical items and crawling born-digital content on the Internet. As this collection grows, it will be a searchable trove of information and images that captures this special side of the Gulf Coast.”


Other program members have found that reaching out to local website creators about preserving their online content has led to opportunities for collaboration and community-building. “Reaching out to site owners to inform them of our web archiving has, of course, made it possible to ensure that their web content remains accessible even when their project or specific datasets ability to pay for web hosting ends, but it has also been a wonderful opportunity to start conversations and forge new connections: W. We are here to help it endure,” said Carissa Pfeiffer of Buncombe County Libraries in North Carolina. “So far, we have saved at least one blog and one genealogy resource which had been planned for deletion by their respective owners, alongside websites whose contents reveal, for instance, public efforts to hold local government accountable for reparations efforts.”





The Buncombe County Libraries in North Carolina documented the aftermath of Hurricane Helene by archiving websites from grassroots relief organizations
Pfeiffer also reflected on the importance of archiving online content in the aftermath of a natural disaster. “In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina. A critical challenge was the near-total loss of regular methods of communications (internet, cell service, and power). As WiFi began to return, first to local hubs like public libraries, new web pages popped up—crowdsourced roundups of information on where to find supplies, websites for grassroots relief organizations, dedicated Helene resource pages from local governments—and then changed rapidly as new information was shared,” she said.