The Community Webs project is a two-year program funded by IMLS and the Internet Archive. The goal of the Community Webs Project is to empower public libraries to create web archives that preserve community history. For more information, visit the program’s website.

As a participant in the Community Webs project, the San Diego Public Library created a community history web archive intended to reflect the people, places, and culture of the city of San Diego. The San Diego Public Library is committed to the preservation of websites that document the cultural diversity, current events, politics, government, and businesses of the city of San Diego.

A web archive consists of archived copies of live websites, social media, video, and audio that will function in the same way it did when it was captured. The archive also stores information about the captured web content, including the date and time that it was captured. Due to limitations in web crawling technology, capture quality cannot be guaranteed and certain page elements may not display correctly.

The web is inherently ephemeral. The average lifespan of a website in its current state is just 90 days! As the web becomes the main method of disseminating information, it is increasingly urgent that websites with demonstrable importance are collected and preserved for use by future researchers.

After seeds are selected, web crawlers are dispatched to begin the capture. Once completed, the WARC file is deposited for storage, converted and rendered, and made accessible for use.

Web archives reflect various types of web content, including but not limited to:

• Websites


• Social media content from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, etc.


• Blogs


• Video content from YouTube and Vimeo, etc.


• Audio content from Soundcloud, etc.

The web archive is focused on preserving content worthy of long-term preservation and that could shed light on present-day San Diego for future researchers. In order to create a web archive that is inclusive and representative of histories, experiences, and contributions of the residences of the City of San Diego, collected items must meet at least one of the following criteria:

• A website that is created by a person who lives in or is from the city of San Diego.


• A website that is about a person, place, event, group, or thing in and/or from the city of San Diego.

The web archive is intended to be community-driven, so we welcome and encourage community input. We want the web archive to be reflective of YOU! If you know of any local websites, social media, or online videos or audio that should be preserved, please fill out our submission form! If the suggested content falls within our collection scope, it will be included in our web archive.

The San Diego Public Library asserts no claim of ownership over the materials collected in the web archive and will honor requests from rights holders to remove archived content. Please direct any such requests to weblibrary@sandiego.gov.

Please send your inquiry to weblibrary@sandiego.gov.

Web Archiving - The process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web, preserving the collections in an archival format, and then serving the archives for access and use.

Website - A website is a collection of related web resources, usually as grouped by some common addressing – as when all resources on a single host, or group of related hosts, are considered a 'website'. (Archive-it)

URL (Uniform Resource Locator) - The location of a resource on the web. (Archive-it)

Seed - A URL appearing in a seed list as one of the starting addresses a web crawler uses to capture content. Also called a targeted URL. (Archive-it)

Web Crawler - A web crawler is a software agent that traverses the web in an automated manner, making copies of the content it finds as it goes along. Web crawlers are used to create the index against which search engines search, or, in the context of archival crawling, to capture web content intended for longer-term preservation. (Library of Congress)

Harvest - Web sites are collected via software that downloads code, images, documents, and other files essential to completely and faithfully reproduce the web site at the time of capture. At the same time, the web crawlers also collect metadata about the conditions of the harvest process. (IIPC)

Preservation - The intent of web archiving is to preserve the original form of the harvested content without modification. To achieve this goal the tools, standards, policies and best practices need to be in place that will ensure the management of web archives over time. (IIPC)