WMS students help archive websites

Websites often come and go. Their

information changes daily. Still some websites can have historical

significance and be important to future generations.

That’s the idea behind the K12 Web

Archiving Program, a partnership between the Internet Archive and

the Library of Congress. In its third year, the program works with

students in schools across the country to preserve websites.

Seventh graders at Whitefish Middle

School were one of 14 schools to participate in the program during

the school year.

Librarian Dana Carmichael applied to

participate in the program. She partnered with teachers Megan Pepe

and Sara Parr on the project.

Seventh grade history students nominate

websites for archiving and then a volunteer group of nine students

evaluated those websites and chose which would be included.

Whitefish students chose to record

information on Montana Native American tribes, Montana recreation

activities and the topic of “Are trains still important?”.

Carmichael said the project helped

students learn to be self-sufficient.

“One of the big concerns from the

librarian perspective is that students are on the Internet multiple

times a day and they have to decide what webpages are accurate and

current,” she said.

The volunteer evaluators spent several

lunch periods looking through the websites nominated by other

students. They had to determine if the website was worthy of being

archived. The program uses a web archiving service that’s captures

digital content from the web to create a type of time capsule.

“It was fun to see what you could learn

on the websites,” student Sam Benkleman said.

He was particularly interested in the

Browning High School website which gives a description of Native

American life.

Student Cooper Donahue said reading all

the websites he learned a large amount of information.

He enjoyed learning about the sites

that deal with recreation in Montana. Students selected sites

dealing with skiing, dinosaurs and camping.

“The other topics were all pretty

serious, but that was fun,” he said.

Students seemed to learn about the

topics without even realizing they were learning.

“If you can make it fun and sneak in

learning that’s always good,” Carmichael said.

To look at the Whitefish students’ work

visit http://archive-it.org/k12/10WhitefishMS.html.