Web archiving union websites to enhance the Texas Labor Archives

The purpose of The Compass Rose is to raise awareness of Special Collections' resources and to foster the use of these resources. The blog series also reports significant new programs, initiatives, and acquisitions of Special Collections.

Beginning in summer 2019, former UTA Libraries Digital Archivist Devon Proudfoot and I, University and Labor Archivist Michael Barera, collaborated on a project that captured the websites of numerous Texas unions and labor organizations and incorporated them into the Texas Labor Archives web archive, which is powered by an Internet Archive service called Archive-It.

The Texas Labor Archives have been a physical component of the UTA Libraries Special Collections department since their creation by UTA history professors George Green and Howard Lackman and UTA head librarian John Hudson in 1967. At its inception it was the first repository in the Southwestern United States to systematically collect the history of Texas labor as well as the first archival collection at UTA. It was well received by the Texas labor community from the start, and by the summer of 1967, the Texas AFL-CIO had designated the Texas Labor Archives as its official repository and urged full cooperation between all unions in the state and the archives. In 1967, Dr. Green also established an oral history program that focused on Texas labor history and, especially, elderly, African American, and Hispanic American labor leaders and union members.

Today, the Texas Labor Archives continue to collect, preserve, and provide access to materials that document the history of organized labor in Texas. It includes the records of hundreds of organizations, including union locals, labor councils, statewide labor organizations, union political groups, the district and regional offices of international unions, and legal firms specializing in labor law. The archives also include the personal papers of union officials. Collections in the Texas Labor Archives are made up of charters, contracts, correspondence, photographs, minutes of meetings, newspapers, pamphlets, scrapbooks, and numerous other formats. The single oldest item in the collections is a typographical minute book from Austin that dates to 1870, while some of the other oldest materials include Carpenters' minutes from Waco, Longshoremen's minutes from Galveston, and the German-language minutes of San Antonio brewery workers. There are also now more than 200 oral histories with union leaders and labor activists in the collections.

The web archiving component of the Texas Labor Archives was a new project that Devon and I collaborated on to preserve the websites of labor unions and organizations. It is a natural extension of our current physical collections that is built upon existing relationships. Our web archiving initiative uses a tool called Archive-It to preserve all aspects of websites: images, text, designs, and more. It not only allows for instant access for researchers and the public, but it also makes possible the preservation of new digital records.

This project sought explicit permission from every still-existing union local or other labor organization that had preciously donated materials to the Texas Labor Archives and currently has an internet presence. Therefore, Devon and I contacted the leadership of labor unions and organizations that had already contributed physical materials to the Texas Labor Archives. We wanted to make the Texas Labor Archives web archive as comprehensive as possible and thus reached out to all individual unions we could find contact information for to seek their permission before adding their website to the web archive. The fundamental goal of the project is to preserve Texas labor websites for posterity: for researchers, unions and union members, and the public.

At the beginning of the project, I began by creating a spreadsheet listing all the labor-related organizations (mostly but not entirely union locals) with physical materials in the Texas Labor Archives. From here, I searched the Internet to determine which of these organizations are still in existence and which still have Internet presences with contact information. I determined that, of 170 different organizations that have donated to the Texas Labor Archives, only 38 fit these criteria. I then contacted these 38 organizations using a combination of e-mails, phone calls, and print letters, depending on contact information available for each organization. Organizations contacted by e-mail or print letters received a form letter I created explaining the project to develop a Texas Labor Archives web archive with a formal request for their consent to participate. They also received a PDF file (by e-mail) or printed PDF (for print letters) of a slideshow giving further details about the project and screenshots of an early addition to the web archive. I had initially created this slideshow for in-person presentations to both the Dallas AFL-CIO Council and the Tarrant County Central Labor Council to inform them directly about this project, and I later repurposed this slideshow for informative purposes while contacting other labor organizations by e-mail or print letters. For organizations that only listed phone numbers on their websites, not e-mail or street addresses, I simply read the form letter when calling them.

A total of 15 of the 38 organizations responded in the affirmative, giving permission for us to archive their websites with Archive-It. Most of the remaining 27 did not respond after our third and final contact attempts, and therefore their websites were not crawled for this project. After permission was obtained in each case, I sent written proof of such permission (mostly e-mails) to Devon for collection, and then he ran a test crawl in Archive-It on each website for which permission was given. Both he and I performed quality control on each site. If it passed both of our inspections, it was added to the Texas Labor Archives web archive immediately. If it did not, Devon tweaked crawl settings and options until the result ultimately passed our scrutiny, at which point it was added to the collection.

The 15 organizations contributing to this endeavor to jump-start the Texas Labor Archives web archive make up the majority of the collection on Archive-It today, which now consists of a total of 19 seeds. All are accessible to the public on the Texas Labor Archives collection page on Archive-It. Among the organizations granting their permission and now included in the web archive are some of the most important labor unions and councils in the state of Texas and the DFW Metroplex: the Texas AFL-CIO, the Dallas AFL-CIO Council, the Tarrant County Central Labor Council, and the Association of Professional Flight Attendants. Labor union locals included demonstrate both geographic and professional diversity, including American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employers (AFSCME) Local 1624 in Austin, International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) Local 478 in Waco, International Association of Machinists (IAM) District Lodge 776 in Fort Worth, United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 848 in Grand Prairie, and United Brotherhood of Carpenters (UBC) Local 14 in San Antonio. Other organizations represented in the new web archive include the Ironworkers District Council of Texas and the Mid-South States, National Labor Relations Board's Fort Worth Regional Office, and Gene Lantz's Labor Dallas website.

By January 2020, we completed this initiative to contact all donors of physical materials to the Texas Labor Archives that still exist today and ask them for their permission to have their websites added to the Texas Labor Archives web archive. However, I remain extremely interested in obtaining permission to add more Texas labor-related websites to the web archive. As more and more union business is conducted in digital-only environments and as much of these born-digital documents are being shared on websites instead of in paper folders, the power of a web archive to document the labor movement in Texas is greater than it has ever been before and will almost certainly continue to gain in importance into the future.

If you are a labor union or other labor-related organization in Texas that would like to have your website preserved for posterity, for the benefit of your membership, researchers, and the general public alike, please contact me at michael.barera@uta.edu to be included in our growing Texas Labor Archives web archive.