Oxford Untold Stories: Web Archiving

Learn about the new web archiving project that the Archives is taking on this year.

By Megan Lockhart, Archives Technician

Over the past several years, staff at the Oxford County Archives have been reviewing our record holdings and have noticed some glaring gaps in our historical records. With the majority of the records being Euro-centric in origin, certain populations are greatly underrepresented in the archival records we maintain; this includes visible minority groups, people and families living in poverty or experiencing homelessness, people living with disabilities, the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, women, and other equity-seeking groups. Oxford County’s heritage and culture in totality is not just comprised of the Euro-centric stories and histories we so commonly hear, but taking a look through our records, you would come to this misconceived conclusion. After reviewing the scope of our collections, we knew we had work to do.

As a starting point, we began brainstorming ways in which we could connect with local community groups, organizations, and associations related to Oxford’s underrepresented populations, in a way that was also convenient and safe for them. We began our research into what community groups were out there, and quickly found that not only were there many, but most of these groups had a massive amount of online content on websites and social media pages. These websites contain event updates, local stories, photographs, videos, interviews, and much more – records that are invaluable to telling these communities’ stories. We then had a light-bulb moment, and after discovering a web archiving opportunity through the Community Webs program, we developed a new web archiving initiative to capture the online content and stories connected to these community groups. We’ve called it “Untold Stories”. We also recognize that web content is fleeting, which is another factor that influenced our decision to focus on web archiving for the time being.

We began the project by establishing a list of websites and social media pages that we thought should be prioritized for archiving. Once we had our list compiled, we began reaching out to the community groups and organizations to establish contact, explain the project, discuss why we wanted to capture their online content, and to answer any questions or concerns they had. Ultimately, we reached out to ask permission to archive their websites, and to take a collaborative approach to the project. If any group was uncomfortable with their content being archived, we wanted to know and accepted their wishes to not be included in the project. Utilizing the “Archive-It” web archiving service, we began archiving! Thus far, the community partners we are working with include the Muslim Association of Woodstock, the Oxford Caribbean Canadian Association, the Oxford Local Immigration Partnership, Oxford County Pride, the Oxford Housing Action Collaborative, Social Planning Council Oxford, and local Black history historian, blogger, and author Heather Rennalls. The web archiving software “crawls” through these sites, capturing their content at a specific point in time. We schedule these crawls regularly for each site depending on how often the sites are updated or changed. This captured content is then made publicly available to view on a database. We’ve also been utilizing “Archive-It” to capture the county’s COVID-19 web updates and online content.

The "Archive-It" home page

The "Newcomer Stories" page we've capture on the "Welcome to Oxford" website

Oxford County Pride's Twitter feed

A screenshot of Heather Rennall's Black history blog/website from our database.

Just a few photos from the Woodstock Muslim Association's website which we've captured and preserved through web archiving.

Through our correspondence with various community organizations, we’ve begun the work of expanding our services to a larger audience and establishing important and necessary relationships to move forward and expand the historical narratives and records that we preserve. Beyond preserving online content, there have been discussions of physical record donations to the archives, loans for scanning, and opportunities for archives staff to speak at and attend events. We aim to expand our partnerships to include more community groups, and find ways to collaborate beyond web archiving, perhaps with exhibit development, record interpretation, events, and an exchange of knowledge and culture. Check out what we’ve archived so far at https://archive-it.org/home/oxfordcountyarchives.

If your community group or organization is interested in being a part of this web archiving project, contact us at archives@oxfordcounty.ca.