By: Lauren Ko, University of North Texas, and Shannon Willis, Texas State University, Co-chairs of the Web Archiving Texas Interest Group
This year, the United States reached its semiquincentennial, 250 years after signing the Declaration of Independence. Texans have celebrated with bigger than usual Fourth of July events, art and exhibits recognizing the history leading to this occasion, ceremonies to honor veterans, and service to their communities. Seeking to build a record of these activities and the reflections of Texans at this significant milestone in our country’s history, the Texas Digital Library (TDL) Web Archiving Texas Interest Group (WATXIG) collaborated on an archiving project to preserve web content demonstrating the way Texas and Texans have been acknowledging America’s 250th birthday. WATXIG put out a call to the community, welcoming anyone to identify and submit URLs for inclusion in this Texas America 250 Web Archive. Using a nomination tool set up by Lauren Ko, co-chair of the WATXIG and Head of Software Development at the University of North Texas Libraries, contributors submitted URLs for the project, optionally including their name and institution and a scope for crawling the webpage.
While the nomination tool went live toward the end of May 2026, the group held a Zoom event on July 1, 2026 to demonstrate the tool, answer any questions contributors might have, and provide working time for people to collectively find and nominate webpages together. This event helped boost awareness for the project and created dedicated time for people to work on the project collaboratively with colleagues from across Texas. When the nominating period concluded at the end of July, more than a dozen individuals from seven different Texas institutions contributed to the project which gathered over 1,400 URLs to archive.
Throughout July and the beginning of August, Lauren Ko ran crawls using Browsertrix Crawler to capture the nominated URLs. After quality assessment showed that some websites blocked the crawler or contained content the crawler didn’t faithfully capture (such as videos), Shannon Willis, co-chair of the WATXIG and Head of Digitization and Preservation at Texas State University, used ArchiveWeb.page to archive the problematic URLs.
The resulting collection of captured web content from these crawls is being hosted by the University of North Texas (UNT) in The Portal to Texas History as the Texas America 250 Web Archive.
This project represents a collaborative effort of professionals at memory institutions across Texas to capture this unique moment in time as America celebrated its semisesquintennial. The group hopes the gathered materials will help future historians make sense of this moment and better understand its impact in the state. The success of this collaborative web archiving project should also hopefully inspire future collaborative web archives from the WATXIG, capturing and preserving web content from and about Texas for future generations.