How to Use Archive-It to Curate Domain Collections

There are plenty of ways to archive a single page. But if your aim is to preserve a whole ecosystem of content - entire domains, policy documents, blog networks, or civic records - you’ll need more than a bookmarklet or a scraping script. You’ll need something curated, intentional, and built to scale with meaning.

That’s where Archive-It comes in. Created by the Internet Archive, it offers a way to systematically capture, organize, and publicly share collections of web content with structure and context. Whether you’re a university library, an OSINT researcher, or an organization trying to document a specific moment in time, Archive-It makes it possible to do more than just save - you can shape the archive itself.

Here’s how it works and what makes it uniquely valuable.

Built for Collection, Not Just Capture

Archive-It isn’t another crawler service for casual bookmarking. It’s an archival platform designed for those who want to preserve digital content as a collection - not as isolated artifacts. That means each project gets a dashboard, a searchable index, and a public-facing archive page. You can group content by campaign, topic, event, or geography.

It allows you to tell a bigger story. You’re not just saving what happened. You’re showing why it mattered and how it changed over time.

A Step Up from Personal Tools

If you’ve been using services like Perma.cc to keep your citations alive, Archive-It is the natural next step. Where Perma saves individual references, Archive-It lets you preserve entire source networks: news sites, policy centers, community blogs - anything with a URL and historical value.

And unlike smaller tools that depend on user activity to trigger saves, Archive-It is fully proactive. You set the targets, define the depth, and schedule the captures. The system handles the rest.

Seed URLs Are Your Anchors

Each Archive-It collection begins with one or more seed URLs - these are your starting points. You can use full domains (example.com), subfolders (example.com/press), or even specific pages. The system then crawls outward from those anchors, collecting content based on your parameters.

You choose how deep the crawler goes, what file types to include, and whether to return periodically. It’s not just about grabbing a page once but about building a timeline.

Ideal for Institutions, Funded Projects, or Partnerships

Archive-It is a paid service, usually licensed by academic libraries, nonprofit organizations, cultural institutions, or research initiatives. It’s priced based on storage and bandwidth, which makes it less accessible to individuals - but it also ensures a level of stewardship and sustainability that free services often can’t match.

If you’re affiliated with a university or public organization, there’s a good chance you can get access through an existing partner program. You can explore the current list of public collections at https://archive-it.org/organizations.

Transparency and Public Access

What makes Archive-It especially valuable is that its collections are public by default. Anyone can browse them, search full text, and view archived content through permanent archive.org links.

This makes it not just a tool for preservation, but for accountability. For example, a city government’s collection of COVID-19 updates becomes an official public record. A political site’s campaign trail becomes verifiable. Archived forums, activist websites, or temporary landing pages become part of the historical web - not lost in redesigns or takedowns.

Multiple Formats, Not Just HTML

Archive-It doesn’t just capture static pages. It also saves PDF files, videos, images, and downloadable data - any linked content that fits within your crawl scope. This makes it ideal for curating research archives or issue-based collections where the source material is scattered across formats.

You can then search, tag, and annotate those files inside the platform, making them easier to rediscover and contextualize later.

A Complement to Personal Archiving

You might already use ArchiveBox or Smartial.net tools to maintain local archives, snapshots, and WARC downloads. Archive-It isn’t meant to replace those workflows - it complements them.

Archive-It handles public archival and institutional transparency, while tools like ArchiveBox focus on personal backups, OSINT snapshots, or offline mirroring. The two can work in tandem, especially if you’re managing both short-term research and long-term preservation.

If you're archiving citations for legal or academic use, you might start with Perma.cc. If you're crawling a whole network of sites during an election, Archive-It is your best ally.

A Thoughtful Way to Save the Web

The internet is a chaotic place. Things disappear for no reason. Content gets updated without warning. Archive-It offers a rare opportunity to fight that decay with purpose - to say, “This mattered, and we’re not letting it vanish.”