Schomburg Center Web Archives
The Web Archive Collections include websites, online audio and video, blogs, and other media, organized around specific topics, events, or movements, as well as the Schomburg Center’s own web pages.
Development of the Schomburg Center’s web archiving program is made possible with generous support from Community Webs, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Internet Archive, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s generous support for the #SchomburgSyllabus project under the Scholarly Communications grant structure.
The #SchomburgSyllabus project aims to document 21st century global Black life by continuing the development of the #HashtagSyllabusMovement web archive collection and connecting today’s digital creations with the Schomburg Center’s historical collections.
Web Archive Collection Development
The Schomburg Center utilizes the Archive-It web archiving service to provide a historically relevant picture of Black culture and experiences online. Web archiving preserves the web‐based user experience at the time of collection in order to provide future users with accurate snapshots of what was presented on the archived sites at particular moments in time. Collections are developed and curated around certain topics relating to the Schomburg Center and Black culture. Depending on collection guidelines and the nature of individual websites, websites may be archived at regularly scheduled intervals, such as semi-annual or quarterly.
Search our Web Archives
Featured Collections:
#HashtagSyllabusMovement collection
Inspired by the Hashtag Syllabi have been developed mostly by scholar-activists since 2014, the #HashtagSyllabusMovement web archive collection contains educational materials such as crowdsourced syllabi and public reading lists highlighting Black cultural production, race, police violence, and other social justice issues within the Black community.
COVID-19 collection
This collection centers and documents the African diasporan experiences of COVID-19 including racial disparities in health outcomes and access, the impact on Black-owned businesses, and cultural production. The collection also seeks to document the community impact on New York City through state and local news, and government responses to COVID-19.
For more information about the Schomburg Center's Web Archiving Program please contact : schomburgwebarchives@nypl.org
Information & Resources
Common Web Archiving Terms and Definition
The Internet Archive's Archive-It service offers a comprehensive glossary of web archiving terms.
Web Archiving Tools and Resources
Archive-It - The Internet Archive’s Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service that ues the open-source web crawling technology, Heritrix to help organizations to harvest, build, and preserve collections of digital content through partnerships with libraries and other partners. Archive-it is an affiliate of the nonprofit organization, Internet Archive, and archived content is hosted and stored at the Internet Archive data centers.
Wayback Machine - The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine allows users to view archived websites as they existed on the live web over time. The Internet Archive began archiving cached pages of websites in 1996 and they continue to crawl the web at regular intervals.
Webrecorder - Webrecorder.io is a web archiving service that allows users to create an interactive copy of any web page that they browse, including content revealed by interactions such as playing video and audio, scrolling, clicking buttons, and so forth. The Webrecorder tool is especially useful in archiving dynamic web content that may not be captured otherwise using standard web crawlers.
DocNow - DocNow is a tool and a community developed around supporting the ethical collection, use, and preservation of social media content developed by Documenting the Now. Documenting the Now is building a variety of tools to help archivists, activists and researchers work with social media data.
Web Archive Research Tools
Time Travel Service: The Time Travel Find feature supports discovering prior versions of web pages called “Mementos” in various web archives and version control systems including but not limited to: Archive-It, Internet Archive, DBpedia, Library of Congress Web Archive, Stanford Web Archive, and national web archives of various countries. Memento’s Time Travel Reconstruct feature plays back a “Memento” using the versions found in web archives and version control systems.
Social Feed Manager - Social Feed Manager is open source software that harvests social media data and web resources from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo. Through the web application, users can collect, manage, export and create collections of social media data.
Dark and Stormy Archives Project - The Dark and Stormy Archives Project creates tools to help users analyze, reduce, and visualize web archive collections through storytelling.
ArchiveSpark - ArchiveSpark can be used for easy and efficient access to meaningful information about web archives and other supported datasets by applying filters and tools to web archive metadata records.
ArchivesUnleashed - Archives Unleashed aims to make historical internet content accessible to scholars and others interested in researching the recent past through the development of web archive search and data analysis tools.