We are excited to announce that the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has recently awarded our Archive-It service a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant from its Continuing Education in Curating Collections program for the project Community Webs: Empowering Public Librarians to Create Community History Web Archives.

Working with partners from Queens Public Library, Cleveland Public Library, and San Francisco Public Library, and with OCLC’s WebJunction, which offers education and training to public libraries nationwide, the “Community Webs” project will provide training, cohort support, and services, for a group of librarians at 15 different public libraries to develop expertise in creating collections of historically valuable web materials documenting their local communities. Project outputs will include over 30 terabytes of community history web archives and a suite of open educational resources, from guides to videos, for use by any librarian, archivist, or heritage professional working to preserve collections of local history comprised of online materials.

We are now accepting applications from public libraries to participate in the program! Please help us spread the word about this opportunity to the entire public library community. You can also visit the program’s webpage for more information and the project’s grant materials are available through the IMLS award page.

Curating web archives documenting the lives of their patrons offers public librarians a unique opportunity to position themselves as the natural stewards of web-published local history and solidifies their role as information custodians and community anchors in the era of the web. We owe a debt of thanks to IMLS for supporting innovative tools and training for librarians and look forward to working with our public library friends and colleagues to advance web archiving within their profession and for the benefit of their local communities.