Students from Paul VI Catholic High School in Fairfax, Virginia
Students from NYC Public School 174, Queens
Students from Moran Middle School in Wallingford, CT reflect on their experiences in the K12 Web Archiving Program.
About the Program

The K12 Web Archiving Program provides an opportunity for students to select and save websites for future generations (historians, scholars, their descendants, the general public) to look at 50,100, 500 years from now. The program is finishing its seventh year and was originally developed in collaboration with the Library of Congress.

The students' collections are available here for browsing and searching, and provide an informative, funny, and often touching view into their lives and preferences.

The innovative program provides a new perspective on saving history and culture, allowing students to actively participate and make decisions about what content will be saved. Often this is content that might not be selected and saved in the traditional archive environment. The decisions the students make help them develop an awareness of how the Web content they choose will become primary sources for future historians studying our lives. The program teaches critical thinking, collaboration and problem solving - essential life skills that students need today in order to be successful.

The program uses Archive-It, a web archiving service, to capture Web content to create collection time capsules. Students collaboratively decide the subjects for the collections and the specific websites to be captured, attaching a brief description to every one so that people in the future will know why they chose this content to be archived.

What teachers and students are saying

"Doing a project based on archiving is not as easy as it looks. It takes a lot more skills to finish a job like this. My Web Archiving experience was amazing and will always be archived in my mind."

"I loved how this project changed my students view of history. They felt empowered to speak for their generation about what was important at their school, in their community, and in the larger American culture. It brought real world learning into the classroom."

Learn More

To learn more about Archive-It, please visit our home page at archive-it.org or contact us.

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.