America's Young Archivists: The K-12 Web Archiving Program

Students who participate in the K-12 Web Archiving program use Archive-It to capture websites. They decide what websites to capture and they attach a brief description to every site they archive so that people in the future will know what the sites are about and why the students selected them.

By enabling students to preserve websites, the program gives them an opportunity to not only document their culture and learn about the fragility of digital content, but their work also becomes a primary source of information for future researchers.

This video profiles an eight-grade class from the James Moran school in Wallingford, CT, the website-collection choices the students made and their resulting awareness of how websites require active management to ensure their ongoing accessibility.