Archiving projects

Archiving Local Political Candidate websites

Role: Lead content design and project management

Typically federal and state-level political candidate websites are archived, but it's hit or miss at the local level for a variety of reasons - some people don't have a website, there's no central body collecting websites, and some folks use social media sites instead of a traditional website.

For my library degree master's work at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, I worked with the Wayback Machine team at Internet Archive to collect and archive every local political candidate website in the 2021 and 2022 election cycles. This involved reaching out to and working with a variety of organizations, including the League of Women Voters, Google's Civic Information team, Vote411, the Voting Information Project, and state boards of election.

Fresh Air archive

Role: Grantwriting, editorial

Fresh Air received a grant from CLIR to add metadata to their extensive archive. The project allowed Fresh Air to explore putting the archive online for listeners. Drexel University served as a sub-contracted partner on this project bringing extensive experience in the standardization, cataloguing and "open access" of archives and hidden collections to the project. I helped raise internal interest for the grant, helped with material for the grant proposal, and then led audience engagement sessions around the archive, so that audiences could imagine pathways for access and retrieval.

Anu Paul and I then wrote up an academic case study for how public radio stations could manage an archival project on their own; it has been downloaded over 2,500 times.