Creating Collections, Making Connections: Preserving History and Culture of a Community One Website at a Time
November 15th, 2024
The following guest post from Liz Paulus (she/they), Web Services Librarian of Cedar Mill & Bethany Community Libraries (Oregon), is part of a series written by members of the Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. Community Webs advances the capacity of community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories and underrepresented voices.
Located just west of Portland, Oregon in unincorporated Washington County, Cedar Mill & Bethany Community Libraries provides library services for more than 80,000 people in the most diverse county in Oregon. The library got started in 1974 when a small group of neighbors decided to establish a library in the neighborhood of Cedar Mill. With no city to develop a library, they organized a non-profit and mobilized volunteers to make the dream a reality. Since then, the library has grown into one of the most heavily used libraries in Oregon and includes two locations in the Cedar Mill and Bethany communities as part of a county library cooperative. The libraries just celebrated their 50th anniversary of serving the community and look forward to another 50 years.
The Cedar Mill & Bethany Libraries do not hold physical archives but have served as a local hub for information and engagement for decades and have a legacy of smaller-scale digital projects that focus on local oral histories and library history. The Libraries joined the Community Webs program in 2021 with the goal to “start small” by selecting just one or two websites to archive with plans to expand the scope as staff time allowed. The first priority was a unique local resource, a monthly newsletter called The Cedar Mill News.
For the past 20 years, The Cedar Mill News has chronicled the local events and items of interest in Cedar Mill (and later, the Bethany area as well) in print and online. Besides documenting the changes in the community through local stories and advertisements, the newsletter features local history articles and land use development news, all of which offer rich content for researching local community growth and change. Users can view an archive of monthly PDF newsletters in the Local News Sites Collection (2003-2020) and browse content by year. But this is only part of the web history for this community resource, a story that intersects with the Libraries and other local community organizations.
The newsletter got its first online home while sharing a web domain with the library in a unique partnership with the local business association and other groups during the first decade of the World Wide Web. To tell this story more fully, the project needed access to materials from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. With the assistance of the Community Webs team, the Cedar Mill & Bethany Libraries added 15 years of collected archives for cedarmill.org, a home for the libraries’ websites and other community organizations since 1999.
It all started with the community need for a website. In 1998 it was suggested that the library and the business association share an internet address as a place to post meeting schedules and news. The Executive Director of the Cedar Mill Community Library, Peter Leonard, acquired the domain name “cedarmill.org” with the assistance of another business owner in the area and The Cedar Mill News publisher, Virginia Bruce. Working with Virginia and others, the library and business association set up a basic website domain to host local information.
This arrangement continued to evolve over time as the organizations grew and sometimes changed focus or function. As one browses the sites over the years, many themes stay the same but it is possible to pick out and follow threads of history in the community.
One can get a peek at how the turn of the Millennium was busy for the Library with the new building dedication in June of 2001. The library was an early adopter of e-books and started circulating RocketEBook devices to patrons in 2002. The library site got a design upgrade in 2004 featuring a new image of the expanded library facade, and a new location in 2007 when the Bethany Branch Library opened. The site continued to evolve and the archive shows subsequent website migrations to the present day.
As the newsletter and library evolved, so did other groups represented on the site. The Business Association’s online Directory was active until 2010 when it moved to its own domain, cedarmillbiz.com and The Cedar Mill News evolved into an independent newsletter which later migrated to their own URL at https://cedarmillnews.com.
The collections represent more than just recent history in their pages. This year, as the libraries celebrate the 50th anniversary of their founding, we also note the 150th anniversary of the establishment of the Cedar Mill, Oregon Post Office in a local home which was also the location of an early timber mill. One can see local history groups’ early work to preserve the 19th-century John Quincy Adams Young House, the site of the area’s timber mill and home to the post office from 1874 to 1904. Read a timeline of volunteer efforts to preserve the Young House and explore more articles in the Local History archive collection.
Together, these and other related pages showcase a rich and varied record of community engagement and culture that would otherwise be undiscoverable. Without access to the early history of the cedarmill.org domain, some of these stories would be lost or much harder to make visible for a current audience. The Cedar Mill & Bethany Libraries are fortunate to have this opportunity to use the Archive-It platform to create web archives that shine a light on our communities making their way through times of change and growth, offering glimpses of the past to help inform our future.
Browse Cedar Mill & Bethany Community Libraries’ collections on archive-it.org