The dramatic rise in the public’s use of the web and social media to document events presents tremendous opportunities to transform the practice of social memory.

Web archives can serve as witness to crimes, corruption, and abuse; they are powerful advocacy tools;they support community memory around moments of political change, cultural expression, or tragedy. Atthe same time, they can cause harm and facilitate surveillance and oppression.

As new kinds of archives emerge, there is a pressing need for dialogue about the ethical risks andopportunities that they present to both those documenting and those documented. This conversation becomes particularly important as new tools, such as Rhizome’s Webrecorder software, are developed tomeet the changing needs of the web archiving field.

The National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web will bring together activists, librarians, journalists,archivists, scholars, developers, and designers to talk about how to create richer, non-oppressive webarchives—archives that will better serve their publics and the historical record.

The first two days of the conference will comprise keynote presentations and panel discussions on topicssuch as archiving human rights abuses and the right to be forgotten. The third day will feature workshopsand unconference sessions.

For tickets and schedule, please visit eaw.rhizome.org.

The National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web is organized by Rhizome and hosted at the New Museum, in collaboration with the University of California at Riverside Library (UCR), the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), and the Documenting the Now project (DocNow).

The National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web was made possible by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.