Next Monday, June 3rd at the University of Victoria as part of the Canadian Historical Association’s Annual Meeting [PDF program here], I’ll be presenting a twenty-minute paper entitled “The Internet Archive and Social Historians: Challenge and Potential Amidst the WebARChive Files.” It’ll be a hopefully entertaining (at the very least provocative) romp through the history of the Internet Archive, the promises and potentials (pausing to highlight issues of scope, technical limitations, and ethical considerations), before taking us through two workflows to open our own web archival files.

As I’ll note there, and have elsewhere, this is my attempt to bring a historical end user’s perspective to bear on this issue. There’s a enormous decently-sized conversation about web archives out there, and I want more historians to be at the table to chat about it.

I won’t be reading my paper, as I don’t like that as an audience member, and figured about a year and a half ago that I’d stop going with the pack. The presentation will be up at some point in mid June when I am back from conference travelling.

However, even if I won’t be reading the paper, you can. If you’re a CHA member, it’ll be up on their website. If not, shoot me an e-mail or Twitter @ or DM and I’ll send you a copy (with the usual provisos that it’s a draft, work-in-progress, don’t cite, will be considerably re-worked, etc. etc.).