Documenting Industry in a Changing World: Inside the Industry Associations Web Archive
In this interview, Natalie Burclaff describes the Industry Associations Web Archive and the variety of content it preserves. She also offers insights into the challenges of curating the collection and explains why it serves as a crucial resource for understanding how industry has evolved and responded to global events. This is part of a series highlighting new collections in the Library’s web archives and the behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating them.
Tracee: Please introduce yourself. What is your job at the Library of Congress, and what was your role in creating the Industry Associations Web Archive?
Natalie: I’m Head of the Business Section in the Researcher Engagement and General Collections Division, and co-manage the Science & Business Reading Room. For the Industry Associations Web Archive, I coordinate and manage the collection, and, along with the librarians in my section, select websites to include. When I came to the Library six years ago, I first got involved in web archiving with the Business in America Web Archive – a massive collection of websites of Fortune 500 companies. I’ve also participated in Library-wide collections, like the Coronavirus Web Archive, and in archiving single sites that didn’t belong to any particular web archive collection, some of which were industry websites that eventually found a home in this new web archive.
Tracee: How did you select material to archive? Did you have any specific goals or considerations in mind when nominating content?
Natalie: The challenge is that there are so many industry associations! Pick any industry, and there’s often a bunch of different groups: some focus on niche or new areas within an industry, while others are long-running and have broad coverage. I had to figure out what to include before the collection became too unwieldy too quickly and decided that a great place to start was with the over 80 different research guides created by business librarians in our section. We research and link to a lot of different association websites in our guides because they contain current information on how industries operate and they publish information on trending topics that are of interest to that industry. I started by having all of us in the Business Section review our guides and select association websites to archive – and since that was still a lot of websites, we focused on national associations instead of regional, or international associations in which American companies participate. We also gave preference to websites where content was publicly available over websites where most of the content was behind a members-only login, and websites that were producing original data, articles and reports, instead of reposting content created by others.
Tracee: What are some of the highlights?
Natalie: The variety itself is a highlight. To showcase a sample of what you’d find, I’ll pull from a few different industry websites that represent the things we eat, the places we stay, and the infrastructure all around us. On the Sugar Association‘s page, you’ll find a blog they call “the Sugar Packet,” while over at the American Hotel & Lodging Association‘s website, you’ll find the annual State of the Hotel Industry Report tucked under their Research & Industry Resources. Hopping over to the Wireless Infrastructure Association website, you can view a page of their statements on public policy issues like rural connectivity and rights-of-way, while up and over at National Air Transportation Association, you can learn more about the fixed base operators industry.
Tracee: What challenges have you faced in creating this collection?
Natalie: Aside from trying to limit our scope in the initial captures, we’re now working on expanding the collection to make sure we have a broad representation across the multitude of industries. Using our research guides was a helpful starting point, but we don’t cover all industries so we need to identify gaps. On the technical side, industry associations upload and link to content in various ways, so it’s challenging to make sure we’re capturing all the URLs that link from the parent site. It’s made me very aware of website and link structures.
Tracee: Why do you think web archiving is important for documenting this subject? How do you imagine researchers, now or in the future, might use this web archive?
Natalie: Outside of websites, the Library collects national industry association publications, following guidance in our collection policy statements. To see what we have in our collections, you can browse the catalog with the name of the industry association as the author (for example, see Association of American Railroads where you can find their emergency guidelines, conference proceedings, and directories of hazardous materials shipping descriptions). In the digital age, more and more of industry associations’ content is published and distributed online. Their websites are helpful to capture industry responses to major world events, like the supply chain issues during the pandemic from transportation groups, impacts of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies on service industries, or the effects of natural disasters on insurance, energy and real estate industries. It’s exciting that we’re able to capture, multiple times a year, essentially a snapshot of an industry’s concerns at a given point in time through their website content, like blog posts and advocacy talking points to industry codes of ethics and guidelines. As we get further into the future, I could see the collection being useful for researchers that are tracing how information changes over time, using material from their websites like conference agenda topics or responses to government regulations.
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