Access and Trust

I had the good fortune to attend an Archiving the Black Web meeting last week. The main focus of the few days in St Louis was for fellows to share stories of web archiving work that they had been involved with. A few themes emerged for me while listening to these presentations. We weren’t using Chatham House Rules, but I didn’t ask anyone if I could write about their work here, so these are broad strokes. Fellows were often trying to contact website creators to negotiate consent. This process seemed like it was quite time intensive, and difficult, especially when contact needed to be established, and formal process was being followed. Some fellows were archiving within their existing trust networks, where consent wasn’t such a big hurdle, and seemed to be established in a more informal way. Helping website creators understand what it meant for their websites to be archived was challenging. Communicating why they would want to have a web archive of their content was also challenging.…