PastPages

Welcome to PastPages, an open-source effort to archive digital news.

The group was organized by Ben Welsh, a journalist and computer programmer based in Los Angeles.

Its work included:

• The News Homepage Archive, a collection of 3.5 million screenshots preserved from 2012 to 2018. It is stored in a permanent collection at the Internet Archive.

• Save My News, a personalized clipping service that empowers journalists to preserve their work in multiple Internet archives. Hundreds of journalists have used it to save thousands of stories.

• @OldLAPhotos, a Twitter bot that posts photographs from the Los Angeles Public Library's digital collection.

• A series of open-source archiving tools supported by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. They include Storytracker, Memento for Wordpress, Memento for Django and django-urlarchivefield.

• Python APIs that allow programmers to more easily archive sites at the Internet Archive, archiveis and WebCite.

PastPages' work has inspired a successful Kickstarter campaign, won an innovation award from the Library of Congress and earned praise from Nieman Journalism Lab, The Wall Street Journal, Journalism.co.uk, The Poynter Institute, L'Obs and GOOD.

The organization is no longer active, but Welsh continues to experiment with digital archiving techniques on GitHub and elsewhere online.