In November 2017, the cohort gathered together at the Internet Archive for a kickoff meeting of brainstorming, socializing, and, of course, talking all things web archiving. local history programs and ideas for collection development around web materials. Attendees talked about building collections documenting their demographic diversity or focusing on local issues, such as housing availability or changes in community profile.
As an example, Abbie Zeltzer from the Patagonia buy sales lead Public Library, spoke about the changes in her community of 913 residents as the town redevelops a long dormant mining industry. Zeltzer intends on developing a web archive documenting this transition and the related community reaction and changes.
Since the kickoff meeting, the Community Webs cohort has been actively building collections, from hyper-local media sites in Kansas City, to neighborhood blogs in Washington D.C., to Mardi Gras in East Baton Rouge. In addition, program staff, cohort members, and WebJunction have been building out an extensive online course space with educational materials for training on web archiving for local history. The full course space and all open educational resources will be released in early 2019 and a second full in-person meeting of the cohort will take place in Fall 2018.
