Historic effort to archive Black digital lives begins
‘Web culture would be quite boring without the presence of Black people’
Black lives in America, especially as they play out in Facebook exchanges, tweets, memes, gifs, pictures, videos and chats, are increasingly vital to understanding the history of now.
As this ephemeral information speeds past us in binary bits, untethered to anything lasting and permanent, is it possible to capture and archive it for future generations?
With a project called “Archiving the Black Web,” Makiba Foster, and the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center in Fort Lauderdale, wants to try.
Preserving memorable online moments — an Evite flier for a Black Lives Matter protest in South Florida, a COVID victim’s obituary on Facebook, a tweet from Kanye West — is important not only for Black history, but American history, Foster says.
“I don’t want to generalize, but a lot of trending that happens in these social-media spaces have some kind of connection to something that is Black,” she says. “Web culture would be quite boring without the presence of Black people.”
The Broward County Library Foundation this week was awarded a $150,000 National Leadership Grant from the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program to design a plan to preserve and document the Black experience online.
The project will be led by Foster, in a partnership with some of the most prestigious institutions in the field, among them New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Auburn Avenue
Research Library in Atlanta and the African American Museum and Library at Oakland.
Foster says the grant represents the first step in a monumental journey. Its lofty ambitions are spelled out in its formal title, ”Archiving the Black Web: A National Forum to Map the Landscape, Define the Issues, and Plan a Strategy for Documenting the Black Experience Online.”
“It’s massive. It’s neverending. But I feel like there are ways that we can work, hopefully, to create, if nothing else, a snapshot of who we were as a culture in 2020,” Foster says. “I am benefiting from the labor of people I never knew, and this kind of work will hopefully benefit people that I will never know. It is a way of paying it forward, in terms of Black culture and that it is documented in this new digital space.”
‘A little jewel’
Foster came to the Fort Lauderdale library in May 2019 from the acclaimed Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, a division of the New York Public Library, where she served as the assistant chief librarian and established a groundbreaking web-archiving program. Scholars from around the world are drawn to the Schomburg, which Foster calls “the mecca” for research in Black studies.
The Schomburg and the Fort Lauderdale center are two of three libraries in the United States with archival collections dedicated to the culture and history of African Americans and others of African descent. The third is the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History in Atlanta.
One of Foster’s goals is to raise the stature of her new library, which she says has the potential to be a premiere Black cultural research institution.
“This place is a little jewel
in Broward County,” she says. “It has the ability to be just as prominent as Auburn Avenue Research Library. The confluence of Black culture in this area is amazing — its proximity to the Caribbean, different pockets of Black culture throughout the area. I think there is a lot of opportunity to document and tell stories about this particular, unique area.”
Broward County Libraries Division Director Kelvin Watson says that, beyond her two master’s degrees, Foster brings a unique skill set to the job.
“Her depth of knowledge, creative approach to making the academic accessible in African American research, and her talent to communicate with the public make her a great asset,” Watson says.
“This place is a little jewel in Broward County.”
Makiba Foster, African-American Research Library director
Here today, gone tomorrow
While it comes as the internet is exploding with news that matters to Black lives, the grant is something the library began working on in 2019. Foster’s effort in this work goes back to 2014, when she created a hashtag archive in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
The nonprofit Internet Archive, run by the American Library Association, touts access to more than 458 billion web pages through its Wayback Machine, but Foster says even that effort misses information.
“Most people assume that once it’s on the internet, it’s there forever, and that’s not the case,” she says.
Many people have moved on from websites and are using Facebook, which is particularly hard to archive, Foster says. Also vulnerable are a profusion of rich and multilayered conversations happening on so-called Black Twitter.
“If someone comes to me in 20 years and says what was South Florida doing as it related to the Breonna Taylor protests? ‘Did you all do anything?’ If all of that stuff was digital, and none of it was archived in any kind of way, there’s no real evidence that anything happened,” she says.
When a grassroots organization abruptly ends its effort, when a fee for a domain name or web host isn’t paid, that content can vanish. A website for a politician that loses a race can quickly disappear, Foster says.
Sometimes not so quickly: Foster says the website for Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum evolved over the course of several days in November 2018, after he conceded the election to Ron DeSantis and then withdrew that concession when the secretary of state called for a recount. DeSantis prevailed by less than 33,000 votes.
“So you get these iterations of websites that don’t always get captured,” Foster says.
“The average life span of a piece of digital material is 90 days. You could come back and that material is still there, but it has changed in some kind of way. It’s an iteration of what you may have seen 90 days before. Or it’s just gone,” she says.
Foster says the grant to the Fort Lauderdale library is an endorsement of the importance of public libraries and their local relationships in doing this kind of work documenting community history. The next step in the process will be creating a strategy for expanding resources for the project and enlisting institutions large and small to get involved.
“There is a need for, not only public libraries, but for Black cultural organizations and Black memory workers, to be able to have access and the resources that will allow for their institutions to start this kind of for-us, by-us web archiving.”