Built To Last: Archiving and Preserving Your Website

One great thing about the web is that publishing is easy. Preservation, on the other hand, can be a bit more complicated. Platforms can change and projects lose funding; faculty retire and students graduate. Digital scholarship projects that once felt permanent can quietly fade away if nobody plans for what comes next.

That's why our next Community Professional Development Session on June 16 will focus on website archiving and preservation.

At Reclaim, we've spent years helping people create and host websites, but creating them is only part of the story. What happens to those sites, projects, portfolios, and digital collections years down the road? What happens when the grant ends, the server is retired, or the software that powered a project is no longer maintained?

We discussed many of these subjects last Septmeber with the Webrecorder team, who reminded us that preserving a website is about much more than saving a backup.

Today's web is dynamic, interactive, and deeply connected. Preserving it means preserving not only the files, but also the context, functionality, and experience that make the work meaningful in the first place.

During our upcoming session, we'll explore the differences between backups and archives, discuss practical approaches to web preservation, and share tools and workflows that can help institutions, educators, and individuals think more intentionally about the long-term future of their digital work.

We'll also talk about sustainability. One of the most compelling themes from our past discussion on web archiving is that preservation works best when it gives people agency. That can be achieved by using open formats, portable archives, and approaches that don't lock content into a single platform or service. The goal isn't simply to keep websites online, but also to ensure that the work, stories, and communities represented by those sites remain accessible for years to come too.

Whether you're responsible for a departmental website, a digital humanities project, student portfolios, institutional archives, or simply your own corner of the web, we hope you'll join us for the conversation. If your website is worth building, then it's also worth remembering.

Join us on June 16 at 12:00 PM ET for our free Archiving and Preservation Community ProfDev Session.