Web Archiving for Beginners

This beginner-level workshop aims to empower archivists to begin preserving web content using accessible and user-friendly tools. As the collective cultural record moves increasingly online, the issue of long-term preservation of web content is more pressing than ever. This workshop is catered to community archives and other cultural heritage institutions with limited resources looking to start a web archiving project. This workshop will introduce participants to the practice of web archiving and provide guidance to start building web collections on a small scale. It aims to encourage active participation through a mix of hands-on practice, live demonstrations, and discussions. The workshop will cover some helpful concepts and terms in web archiving, provide sample workflows to guide a web archiving project and give participants the opportunity to practice archiving web pages using Webrecorder, a suite of open-source web archiving tools, and Conifer, an online web archiving service. 

Workshop Objectives: 

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Plan a web archiving project

2. Create a web archive

Workshop Instructors:

Hélène Brousseau is the digital media and visual resources librarian at Concordia University, formally the digital collections and systems librarian at Artexte where she lead Artexte’s Web archiving initiatives, including introductory workshops using Webrecorder and Conifer.

Sarah Lake (she/her) is the Digital Preservation Librarian at Concordia University since 2020. She offers regular workshops on web archiving to the Concordia community and to the wider public, and she has presented on web archiving initiatives at local and international conferences. Her research interests include open-source and community-driven digital preservation. She holds a Master of Information Studies from McGill University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University.