Supporting Solidarity: Appraising and Collecting Online Content Surrounding the Women's Marches in Maryland

Abstract

Report and presentation from the MARAC conference in Buffalo, NY on October 28, 2017. S23, "Documenting Social Protest: Lessons Learned from the Women's March." This project took place in the context of an entire course on archival appraisal at the University of Maryland and had powerful implications for archival outreach as activism as well as the tools needed to carry out collection development for born-digital materials. We used Archive-It to crawl social media pages and decided to focus on local solidarity marches in Maryland as the national Women's March was already well-documented. As students, we learned that activism and outreach are integral to the archival profession; we have to be able to explain why we as archivists want to document social protest.