Alexandria Community Web Archives

Collection

Identifier: WA001

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

The Alexandria Community Web Archives contains web-published primary sources documenting the history and culture of Alexandria, Virginia. The collection includes the websites, blogs, and social media sites of and about local businesses; local history, culture, and arts organizations; local news publications, local non-profit and community organizations, and local religious organizations.

Please note that this is a “living collection” which will continue to grow over time. Check this collection guide for regular updates.

Dates

Captured 2023 - present

Conditions Governing Access

Websites that are archived for inclusion in the Alexandria Community Web Archives will be preserved and made freely available to the public in perpetuity.

Conditions Governing Use

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Historical Note

In 2023, the Alexandria Library Local History / Special Collections launched the Alexandria Community Web Archives. In support of this new program, the Library partnered with Community Webs – an initiative of Archive-It and the Internet Archive, which aims to advance the capacity for public libraries, community archives, and other cultural heritage organizations to collaborate with their communities to build archives of web-published primary sources documenting local history and underrepresented voices. Community Webs achieves this mission by providing resources for professional training, technology services, networking, and scholarly research.

Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the internet, in order to preserve and provide access to these websites for future use. The goal of web archiving is to capture a “snapshot in time” of parts of the web and (as best as possible) to recreate the experience that a user would have had if they had visited those sites on the live web. A web archive is a group of archived websites that are often organized by theme, event, subject area, or web address.