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Miramonte High School

Charleston High School

Baton Rouge High School

If you were a high school student, which websites would you want to save for future generations? This is the challenge we posed to students and their teachers. In the spring of 2008, Internet Archive, the Library of Congress and California Digital Library collaborated on a project that explores archiving the Web from the perspective of high school students. In the fall we plan to broaden the program's outreach to additional high schools and eventually middle and elementary school students. To get involved and/or learn more, please email us at archive-it@archive.org.

We hope that stimulating students to think about history in the context of their own lives will provide them an opportunity to actively engage in selecting the matter of history in the future, and help students begin to grasp the tremendous challenges presented by a world in which information can be both generated and annihilated in a heartbeat.

Using the Archive-It service, students from three different high schools selected born digital content available via the Web to create "time capsules" to represent their world. By allowing students to identify sites that will be preserved for the long-term, the pilot gave teens a chance to identify and document their cultural history and the world that's important to them. Unlike time capsules of tangible objects, which usually remain hidden for decades or centuries, the resulting Web collections are immediately visible and publicly accessible here, with full text search for study and analysis.

"...we noticed that many adults assume that this generation is just "playing around" when they're on the computer or "not really paying attention" to what is going on in the world. I think our students have really shown that yes, they are playing but in a creative way that does require brain power and that they do pay attention to what is going on in the world. Just look at the sites they have chosen. They do care and they do want to have a positive impact on the world; they just do so in a format that is somewhat alien to generations before them."

"I knew that websites changed periodically, but I didn't realize that once they are changed, they can never be viewed as they once were unless we archive them"

To learn more about Archive-It, please visit our home page at http://www.archive-it.org/ or email us at archive-it@archive.org.

To learn more about the Library of Congress NDIIPP initiative, please visit http://www.digitalpreservation.gov.

To learn more about California Digital Library, please visit http://www.cdlib.org.