At the end of yesterday’s class, I gave a PowerPoint presentation on the DH tool Archive-It!. This particular tool is of prime importance to the field of digital humanities because it is primarily used by various entities to maintain and organize digital archives and collections. These entities include academic institutions (such as college/university libraries and k-12 program schools) and geographic areas (such as cities and countries). Archive-It! also serves the purpose in obtaining publically accessible social networking sites that uses such features as blogs, photos, tweets, and comments (i.e. Twitter and Facebook). People who are not members of Archive-It! ‘s many partner organizations can still easily access online archives on the website by using a search box or four different tabs: Collecting Organizations, Collections, Sites, and Search Page Text.
Each of the four tabs have a certain number of total results, except for the search page text, which is basically an advanced search tab which lacks any total results. Collecting Organizations refers to the patrons and organizations that use Archive-It! ‘s services, Collections refer to the subjects and themes of archives found online, and Sites refer to the specific websites that contain digital archives. The fact that Archive-It! ‘s number of patrons and public collections significantly grows everyday is proof that there are both people involved or not involved in DH who want to preserve important materials and information for future generations.
I hadn’t heard of Archive-It! before and it seems like a good resource to preserve digital content.