Today’s post is authored by Nicole Greenhouse, Web Archivist in Archival Collections Management. 

This week marks the 15th anniversary of NYU Libraries’ first crawls of websites for our web archives! To date, NYU Special Collections has collected approximately 20 TBs of web content over more than 6200 seed websites. Let’s look at some of our oldest captures and see how much web design has changed in the last 15 years. Although I am just sharing screenshots of old web pages, feel free to click the links below the images to surf the pages like you would the live web. 

Tamiment Library was the earliest adopter of web archiving, and some of the selections from left political parties including the Labor Party and the Freedom Socialist Party. The Labor Party was founded in June 1996. The Labor Party platform includes issues such as healthcare and the rights to organize, bargain, and strike. Our crawl of the website was at the tail end of the Labor Party’s existence, by the end of 2007, the Labor Party stopped accepting members and union affiliations. Our crawl represents their last effort in getting on the ballot in South Carolina. The website did not change significantly until 2012, where it was updated to summarize the short history of the organization. The website is still live on the web and virtually looks the same as it did in 2007.

The Labor Party Webpage; February 7, 2007; Tamiment-Wagner: Other Left Activism; https://wayback.archive-it.org/6351/20070207160722/http://www.thelaborparty.org/; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. 

The Freedom Socialist Party was founded in 1966 by former members of the Socialist Workers Party. The party is a revolutionary, socialist feminist organization, dedicated to the replacement of capitalist rule by a genuine workers’ democracy. The website contained their publication, Freedom Socialist, their platform, and information on their affiliates and chapters. In 2007, the website was focused on abortion rights, the Iraq War, and undocumented immigrants. Capture of the website continued up until 2015, when the web archives were migrated over to Archive-it. 

The Freedom Socialist Party Webpage; February 7, 2007; Tamiment-Wagner: Communism, Socialism, Trotskyism Web Archive; https://wayback.archive-it.org/6338/20070207203932/http://www.socialism.com/; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. 

The United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) is an anti-war coalition organization that organizes opposition to U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, against nuclear weapons, and for economic and social justice. In 2007, when the website was first crawled, the organization was focused on anti-war organizing around the fourth anniversary of the Iraq War and potential military strikes in Iran. Tamiment holds the records for the organization, dating back to the 1980s. We still continue to crawl this website twice a year. 

United for Peace and Justice Webpage; February 7, 2007; Tamiment-Wagner: Other Left Activism; https://wayback.archive-it.org/6351/20070207152909/http://www.unitedforpeace.org/; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. 

Lastly, Tamiment holds the records for the Center for Constitutional Rights (TAM 589), which we have also been crawling since 2007. Capture of the website began at http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/home.asp  and included education and outreach information on police brutality, alternatives to incarceration, prison phone contract monopolies, reparations, and the Movement Support Resource Center. Their legal programs in 2007 focused on international human rights, government misconduct, racial and economic justice, September 11, the Cuba travel ban, corporate accountability, and Guantánamo Bay. In late 2007, the URL shifted over to http://www.ccrjustice.org/ where it is still captured by us today.

Center for Constitutional Rights Webpage; February 7, 2007; Tamiment-Wagner: Other Left Activism; https://wayback.archive-it.org/6351/20070207192845/http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/home.asp; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. 

These are just some selections of our earliest crawls of websites in our collections. For me, it is interesting to see how much the web has changed, as well as see what was missing in some of our crawls at the time. The technology, especially at the time in 2007, had a lot of difficulties capturing parts of the website that were not text, so many images, videos, and other embedded elements of the website are likely missing. We also see how content drift, when URLs change, can affect how well we get complete copies of materials. You can see the evidence of that here in these captures. As web design has gotten more complex, we sometimes continue to see these issues today. Part of my job is to combat these issues, while making these materials accessible. To explore more, you can either visit our Archive-it page or search the collections. Here is to many more years of web archiving!