Archiving the Web

In 2021 the Community Archives became part of the Community Webs program run by the Internet Archive. This initiative helps organizations to create locally-focused archives of content from the web. Web pages are notoriously short-lived: the average life-span of a website is a mere two years and seven months, while a single web page may last for just 100 days!

We have begun to create collections of websites from our own community, in hopes of rescuing them from this digital oblivion. The sites we have chosen include local media companies, community groups, municipal websites and sites related to the 2021 federal election. We are also capturing the Community Archives’ own websites.

You can explore the websites we have saved from our Archive-It page. We are interested to hear from members of our community about sites that they would like to see included in our web archive collection.

Perhaps you run a local website and would like to make sure that it is preserved for future users? Or maybe you know of an interesting local site that you worry might not be available in a year or two.

Let us know at archives@cabhc.ca and we will look at adding it to our program of monthly web-crawls. These harvest pages from our selected sites and store them in the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine so that they remain accessible into the future.