Students from Paul VI Catholic High School in Fairfax, Virginia.

If you were a K12 student which websites would you want to save for future generations? What would you want people to look at 50 or even 500 years from now?

These questions are central to the K12 Web Archiving Program, a partnership between the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress. Now in its second year, with 12 schools in 11 states around the country, this innovative program provides a new perspective on saving history and culture, allowing students to actively participate and make decisions about what "at risk" website content will be saved. The decisions they make help them to develop an awareness of how the Web content they choose will become primary sources for future historians studying our lives.

The program uses Archive-It, a web archiving service, to capture born digital content from the Web to create collection "time capsules." Students decide the type of collections and the specific websites to be captured, attaching a brief description to every one so that people in the future will know why they chose this content. By allowing students to identify websites that will be preserved for the long-term, the program gives teens and younger students a chance to identify and document their cultural history and the world that's important to them. Unlike time capsules of tangible objects, which usually remain hidden for decades or centuries, the resulting Web collections are immediately visible and publicly accessible, with full text search for study and analysis.

Applications are now available for the 2010/2011 school year here.

Students from Ames Middle School in Ames, Iowa

"The students love the sense of making a lasting contribution to history and appreciate being able to share what they are working on with friends, teachers, and parents. The success of the K-12 Web Archiving Program at Hammond is a true source of pride for the School."

"I think this is a very cool project for people our age to be doing. It really involves us in something important and these archives will be around forever."

To learn more about Archive-It, please visit our home page at http://www.archive-it.org/ or contact us.

To learn more about the Library of Congress NDIIPP initiative, please visit http://www.digitalpreservation.gov.

To learn more about the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program please visit http://www.loc.gov/teachers.