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About

Hi! I’m Melody Kramer. I work at the intersection of data, journalism, civic stuff and working with communities. I tweet a lot. A long time ago, I wrote jokes for Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me. My family (two adults, two toddlers, two pets) live in Carrboro, NC.

This is a project for LIS 668-01 (Community Informatics) at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where I’m enrolled in the MLIS program. As such, I will be including what I learn and how this project unfolds as the semester progresses. I will also publish my progress report and final paper on this website.

Inspiration for this project comes from the Civic Switchboard Guide and the End of Term Presidential Harvest.

What’s the need?

Many campaign websites for political candidates disappear after election cycles. These are important civic artifacts that can help historians, journalists, archivists, and communities who want to better understand their history.

What you can do:

Libraries and community organizations

  • Create programming for communities to find and archive all local political candidate websites for an upcoming election or specific office.
  • Participate in the Community Webs program. Its mission is to advance the capacity for public libraries and other cultural heritage organizations to build archives of web-published primary sources documenting local history and underrepresented voices. Public libraries from across the country participate in the program.

Journalism organizations

  • Bulk archive the list of candidate websites that this project will produce
  • Encourage your readers /listeners to archive candidate websites
  • Share this project with your community and ask them to archive candidates for a specific election race

The public (that’s you!)

Funders

  • Preserving local candidate websites is vital to helping researchers and journalists. This is a prototype for the upcoming 2022 election cycle. If you’d like to chat about funding a larger project around 2022, please get in touch.