The Tamiment Library Web Collection on Labor Unions and Organizations, first began by Tamiment in 2007, contains webpages of national and regional labor unions, as well as departments and divisions of trade unions. This is an assembled collection, the websites were selected by the archivists. Most of the websites captured are either national American unions or New York metropolitan area local unions. Unions collected in this finding aid represent workers from many different industries, including the service industry, construction, communication workers, transport workers, manufacturing, government, and entertainment industries.
Union websites contain information on their committees, their constitution and by-laws, board members, publications, organizing and mobilization materials, conference materials, member benefits and services, legislative reports and other political action committee materials, information on districts and locals, event listings, and blogs. The websites act to inform their members of their benefits and rights, as well as to create support for their initiatives. Many websites contain information related to strikes and other actions taken up by the unions and document the success and failures of the campaigns. Evidence of union collaboration and mergers are also documented in the web archives.
Other websites in this collection are related to labor education and history, cultural groups, labor festivals, labor legislation lobbying groups, labor action websites, labor councils, labor news websites, job listings, and union products. Many of these organizations are not traditionally unions, but provide support and help to organize workers for better pay, benefits, and representation in the workplace. The collection also aims to document the efforts to organize low-wage service sector workers and minority, immigrant, and female workers.
These websites contain a huge variety of media, which include videos, pdfs, blog postings (including Tumblr and Wordpress blogs), petitions, news feeds, audio, message boards, and other media. These websites often act to document and update upon the organizations' activities, schedule upcoming events, build awareness of their cause or organization, information on projects the organizations are working on, and writings and articles by members of the organization.
The web collection documents the publicly available content of the web page, it does not archive material that is password protected or blocked due to robot txt exclusions. Although Tamiment attempts to archive the entirety of a website, certain file types will not be captured dependent on how they are embedded in the site. This can include videos (Youtube, Vimeo, or otherwise), pdfs (including Scribd or another pdf reader), rss feeds/plug-ins (including twitter), commenting platforms (disqus, facebook), presi, images, or anything that is not native to the site.
