Students at Moran Middle School

If you were a student which websites would you want to save for future generations? This is the challenge we posed to students and their teachers. For the 2008/2009 school year, Internet Archive, the Library of Congress and California Digital Library collaborated on a program that explores archiving the Web from the perspective of students in elementary, middle and high school.

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 ten different schools selected born digital content from 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 program gives teens and younger students 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.

For the 2009/2010 school year we hope to broaden the program's outreach to additional schools around the country. To get involved and/or learn more, please send us your information through this request form. Applications will be sent out mid to late July.

5th grade students at NYC Public School 56 in Queens - The Harry Eichler School

"My students view internet documents differently now. They are more aware of the continually changing nature of the Internet and the impact that has on history. They felt empowered to speak for their generation about what is important to them, what they value and how they communicate."

"I think this is a very cool project for people our age to be doing. It really involves us in something important and these archives will be around forever."

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 the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program please visit http://www.loc.gov/teachers.

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