Collaborative Learning to Support Your Community

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Members of Internet Archive’s Community Webs program at the Community Webs National Symposium

This event was made possible in part by support from the Mellon Foundation. Held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, this year’s symposium was an opportunity for members to learn together and connect with each other. The day was organized around two workshops designed to support the community archiving and digital preservation work happening across Community Webs member institutions.

The first workshop, “Collective Wisdom: Archiving Projects,” was taught by Natalie Milbrodt, CUNY University Archivist and co-founder of the Queens Memory Project. Attendees spent time whatsapp number database in small groups to create definitions of “Community Archiving” and reflect on some of the shared challenges and opportunities they were experiencing when engaging in community-centered work. This workshop emphasized the value of the collective wisdom of Community Webs members and will inform future educational opportunities. The community archives focus of this workshop also supported the Community Webs Affiliates Program, which encourages relationship-building among public libraries and other community-focused cultural heritage and social service organizations to broaden access to archiving tools for documenting the lives of their patrons.


Attendees work together to discuss strategies for documenting their communities
In the second half of the day, Stacey Erdman and Jaime Schumacher of Digital POWRR led a “Walk the Workflow” workshop which demonstrated a step-by-step digital preservation process using a variety of free preservation tools including Internet Archive’s Vault digital preservation system.