WHO WE ARE

Archiving the Black Web (ATBW) was founded in 2019 by Bergis Jules and Makiba Foster as a call to action to establish a more equitable and accessible web archiving practice in the United States to better document the Black experience online. The expansive use of the web and social media by Black people presents significant opportunities and responsibilities for collecting institutions interested in documenting the Black experience online.

While web archiving practice and tools have grown over the past thirty years, it is a cost prohibitive activity that presents access and resource challenges preventing organizations that primarily preserve Black history from fully engaging in the practice. At the same time, web archiving practice has developed mostly within an exclusive network of professionals working in well-resourced, academic institutions and national libraries in the United States and Europe over the last 25+ years. Archiving the Black Web seeks to center the training and other knowledge acquisition needs of collecting institutions and archivists whose main goal is documenting the Black experience from the web.

The three main activities of Archiving the Black Web are:

Providing web archiving training to a broad range of memory workers
Supporting the development of web archiving programs at collecting institutions that document Black life and history
Building, growing, and maintaining the Black Web Community Archive (BWCA)

Archiving the Black Web has been fortunate to receive funding support from the Institute for Museum and Library Services and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We have also been grateful for our partners’ support and their commitment to collaboration since the founding of the project. Our key partners since the founding of the project have been Shift Collective, The College of Wooster Libraries, Spelman College Archives, the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, the Center for Communication, Media Innovation, and Social Change at Northeastern University, Southern California Library, African American Research Library and Cultural Center, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Langston Hughes Community Library and Cultural Center, and the African American Museum and Library at Oakland.

OUR MISSION

To providing web archiving training through the development of the Web Archiving School Training Program (WArc School)
To support the development of web archiving programs at collecting institutions that document Black life and history through a regranting program
To build, grow, and maintain the Black Web Community Archive (BWAC)