Archive-It

December 6th, 2016

by the Archive-It Team

Welcome Mary Haberle to the Archive-It team at the Internet Archive! Mary joined us in October as a Web Archivist, so she will be in frequent contact with partners old and new as they build their collections.

What’s it like to work at the Internet Archive so far?

I just finished my first month working as a Web Archivist. I spent half of this time training at the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco and half working from my home in Los Angeles, where I will be based. The Internet Archive celebrated its twentieth anniversary and Archive-It marked its tenth during the same week that I started! The anniversary programming was a lot of fun, but it also spoke to the level of dedication and passion that staff have for the Internet Archive’s ambitious mission: Universal Access to All Knowledge.

What brought you to your new role with Archive-It?

After relocating to Los Angeles from New York, I was hired by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to process the records of celebrated documentary filmmaker Charles Guggenheim. This was a lot of fun for me because of my interest in politics–Guggenheim pioneered political television ads–and the chance it provided me to interact with paper records after focusing on digitization projects for several years. After completing the collection, I began to seek an opportunity to work with digital records again. Fortunately for me, the end of my project coincided with an opportunity to join the Archive-It team at the Internet Archive!

What web content are you most interested in saving for future generations?

The breadth and depth of web-based content is staggering. I’m excited to help facilitate the capture of online content for a diverse range of partner institutions that represent a variety of collecting interests. I personally find the research potential of social media interactions particularly compelling. Archiving communications across these platforms will give future social scientists unprecedented access to the connections among individuals, social movements, and even governments.

What are you most looking forward to in your first year at Archive-It?

I am most looking forward to learning from my talented colleagues and discovering how the tools developed for Archive-It Research Services (ARS) are opening up web archives data to researcher analysis.

Anything that the partners and your new colleagues might be surprised to learn about you?

I was raised in the 1000 Islands area of Ontario, Canada. Although I have been living in the US for over a decade, I returned to my alma mater in Montreal–McGill University–to earn my MLIS degree in Archival Studies. I am excited that Archive-It has so many Canadian partners and that my new role puts me back in touch with the archives community north of the border.