Building a COVID-19 Web Archive with Grant Funding

Abstract

Grant funding can be a mixed blessing for archivists, and as the economic effects of COVID-19 reduce budgets for libraries and archives nationwide, our profession will see even greater reliance on “soft” money. While there are issues with the damaging effect of grants on the future of the profession, a more pressing concern is the burden that ongoing maintenance costs from former grant projects place upon archival budgets. However, due to the Internet Archive’s forward-thinking subscription model, web archiving is one project that can be completed with a one-time grant, even a small one, with little ongoing cost to the hosting archives. This makes creating a web archive around a current event an attractive and practical project within the limitations of grant funding. This poster will show how we created a web archive documenting COVID-19 in Central Indiana, covering how to pitch web archiving to a grantmaker, how to make appraisal decisions when gathering URL seeds, how to manage crawling within a limited data budget, and tools and techniques for managing this work between several people working remotely. We will also discuss certain pitfalls that we encountered and what other archivists can do to avoid them in the future.