Mary Bakija
Before pursuing an MLIS at Pratt Institute’s School of Information, I worked as a writer and editor focusing on local, online news in New York City. My approach to librarianship is similar, as I aim to continue to tell stories, help others tell stories, and, most importantly, safeguard those stories — a piece that was missing in my journalism work. Today, so much history is built online, and I hope to help contribute to the preservation, long-term open access, and creative use of that history.
Visit this website to explore the results of the web archiving research outlined below:
Using Web Archives
During the 2019-2020 academic year, I was a New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) Web Archiving Fellows at the Frick Art Reference Library, working to preserve websites that align with the collecting policies of the Frick, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.
This technical work of collecting and preserving web archives, as well as professional development experiences I enjoyed during my fellowship, inspired the direction of a practicum project in which I investigated obstacles facing current and potential scholarly users of web archives, and some of the ways web archives might be used.
The results of a survey I conducted on the scholarly use of web archives show that familiarity with and comfort accessing and using web archives could be improved, potentially with better and increased promotion of web archive collections by institutions, as well as better promotion of and instruction on the tools that are available to study the vast data available from web archives.
In the second stage of the project, I tested some of those tools myself to better understand the challenges facing those who want to use web archives in their research, and, using a Python program, created an interpretive data physicalization to demonstrate the ways we might use museum web archives to generate new art.
This technical work of collecting and preserving web archives, as well as professional development experiences I enjoyed during my fellowship, inspired the direction of a practicum project in which I investigated obstacles facing current and potential scholarly users of web archives, and some of the ways web archives might be used.
The results of a survey I conducted on the scholarly use of web archives show that familiarity with and comfort accessing and using web archives could be improved, potentially with better and increased promotion of web archive collections by institutions, as well as better promotion of and instruction on the tools that are available to study the vast data available from web archives.
In the second stage of the project, I tested some of those tools myself to better understand the challenges facing those who want to use web archives in their research, and, using a Python program, created an interpretive data physicalization to demonstrate the ways we might use museum web archives to generate new art.