In 2019, myself, Ed Busch, Jessica Martin, Eli Landaverde, and Lydia Tang received a MSU Library microgrant to capture vulnerable local election websites with intrinsic research value and archive these sites on Archive-It for future researchers. The first round of this project ran for the 2020 election cycle, and we continue to capture local election sites at the mid-term and November elections.

Before we started our work capturing sites, we held a focus group in 2019 with faculty in History and Political Science, Library of Michigan staff, and the Ingham County Clerk to talk about the types of local sites that would be most beneficial to their research and in their classrooms. I used that feedback to generate a spreadsheet of websites for Ingham County candidates for the 2019 election cycle and searched to see if and how often these sites might be preserved through the Internet Archive. Our grant funding allowed us to hire a graduate student to do the web capturing and I created a libguide to serve as an access point to the captures housed in Archive-lt. We issued our final report in April 2020

Ed Busch and I presented a lightning talk at the Mid-Michigan Digital Practitioners meeting to talk about this project, with presentation slides created by the entire grant team. In 2024, Eli, Sarah Mainville, and I presented at a GODORT of Michigan meeting. We also wrote a journal article, published in Fall 2021, detailing our project.

The team currently consists of myself, Eli Landaverde, and Sarah Mainville (joined in 2023).