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Abstract

The Internet has become an increasingly important forum for societal activism, as event mobilization, member organization, and some actions have moved online. These new types of activities, often facilitated by diverse social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, form an increasingly important part of contemporary social movements’ and organizations’ communication, work, and expression. This rapid digitalization and the increase of online activities have created a dilemma for social movement archives and researchers: Born-digital material is necessary to understand our contemporary movements, yet the materials generated and available on the Internet are rarely systematically archived. To help find solutions to this problem, the project Labor Gone Digital (DigiFacket)! set out to construct an archiving system for material created on the Internet by the Swedish trade union movement (i.e., websites and social media feeds). This article reviews the creation of the DigiFacket system and explores the challenges of building a web archive that meets both the needs of the research community and the movements occurring online, and that is easy enough to maintain, even for small archives.

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