As Jill Lepore has written in The New Yorker, most people assume that the Web’s contents will be with us forever. (“Don’t post that picture if you don’t want it to follow you!”) In fact, the Internet is among our most ephemeral inventions: a piece of paper can survive for seven hundred years, but “the average life of a Web page is about a hundred days,” she wrote. To Strauss, collecting #MeToo feels “like we’re in the middle of a ticker-tape parade, and this content is raining down around us, and we need to pick it up or it’s going to get swept up and put in the trash.” So far, the vulnerable sites shored up on Harvard’s servers include a Medium post about sexual harassment in the children’s-book industry, a whisper-network-sourced accounting of abuses in stem, and a hyper-local news service’s investigation of the California state legislature. Ultimately, the collection will reach back to 2006, when the activist Tarana Burke began campaigning against sexual assault using the slogan “me too.”
The Schlesinger staff’s choices shape the archive to a degree that’s unusual, and a little unwelcome. Standard collections have implicit boundaries: they’re the papers of a person or an organization or perhaps the surviving documentation of a single event, such as the March for Life. But #MeToo—which drew strength from millions of sources and exerted influence in every direction—can only be captured in what archivists call a “constructed” or “artificial” collection, an assemblage of objects of disparate provenance, with borders that are imposed, not absolute. The Schlesinger has other constructed collections, such as a survey of early women’s blogs, but the #MeToo project is by far the most ambitious. It pushes the library to the edge of its traditional role in a field that draws a stark line between archivists, who leave as few fingerprints as possible, and scholars, who mold history from the assembled clay.
“It’s not the job of the archivist or librarian to try to answer questions like ‘Is #MeToo a movement?’ or impose our own conceptual framework on this material,” Jane Kelly, the Web-archiving assistant who harvests the bulk of the actual posts and pages, said. “My interpretation is a moot point.” But in this case the collectors can’t help but be curators, judging where #MeToo ends and where every other discussion of women, work, harassment, and violence begins.
Some Internet preservationists have been pushing brick-and-mortar libraries to embrace this evolution. “Traditional archivists seem most comfortable dealing with the outcomes of the work of various types of documenters,” Clifford Lynch, the director of the Coalition for Networked Information, wrote in an influential 2017 paper. But the Internet is more like “a nearly infinite number of unique, individual, personalized performances”—a new one every time you log on—than it is an assortment of artifacts. Lynch warns, “If archivists will not create, capture, curate the ‘Age of Algorithms,’ then we must quickly figure out who will undertake this task.”