On June 25-26, Head Archivist Erin Mustard presented at the Community Webs National Symposium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in advance of the American Library Association annual conference.
Community Webs is a program and partnership offered by the Internet Archive to provide free access to their web archiving tools. The Jacksonville History Center archive joined the program last year and has gradually been using the tools to develop our digital collections. Community Webs offer tools for community archives and smaller cultural heritage institutions to develop, maintain, and provide access to their digital collections and heritage.
Ms. Mustard presented to a group of 40 librarians and cultural heritage workers about the background, progress, obstacles, and future of the JHC’s digital collections development with Community Webs. The archive team has begun to use Vault, a secure digital storage service located in dedicated servers across the country, to organize and store the Leah Mary Cox glass plate negatives collection. This valuable collection highlights the city of Jacksonville and its inhabitants before and after the Great Fire of 1901, focusing on how the city began to rebuild after the disaster. The team will add digital items to this storage space as more of its collections are digitized. Archive-it, or the Wayback Machine, is another tool that the team has begun to explore. The tool allows for the JHC to archive webpages of events and stories that share the history of Jacksonville, historical preservation, and current events that will have future historical value.
You can read the blog post about the Community Webs National Symposium here: Erin Mustard is in the front row, directly under the large “E” of the “LOVE” sculpture in Love Park in Center City, Philadelphia.
We are excited to continue to explore and develop our digital collections for the public as we work to expand accessibility for our members and the public.
Erin Mustard | Head Archivist