RightsCon Toronto 2018

In this panel we will seek to define at risk and risky born-digital information, discuss how to identify such information before it disappears from the web, and explore strategies (tools, communities, and case studies) attempting to archive web content as an antidote to ephemerality. Mark Graham will present work by the Internet Archive to help make the web more useful and reliable with a special focus on identifying, archiving and making available “at risk” information. Alexandra Dolan-Mescal will share how the Documenting the Now project has approached archiving social media through a community and ethics-based lens. Muira McCammon will examine the ever-evolving challenges that come with creating high-fidelity archives of official government Twitter feeds; drawing on her experiences using Webrecorder.io, she’ll focus on disappearing, obfuscated, and deleted military narratives. Our concerns include how the loss of digital records alters our understanding of history, how access to archival holdings of these at risk/risky records may amplify dangerous content, how to identify and capture related at risk material beyond the top layer of the web, and how to sustain large-scale web archiving projects. Together and with an eye towards the future, we will reflect on the ways in which archives are (mis)understood, contested, and imagined.