Earlier this week a Times article looked at social scientists who are trying tostudy Occupy Wall Street in real time. But a group of archivists are also hitting the streets, and the Internet, in an effort to preserve the movement’s traces for scholars of the future.

Within weeks of the occupation of Zuccotti Park last fall archivists from the New-York Historical Society and other institutions were out scooping up posters, flyers, pamphlets, signs and other ephemera. “For us, it’s an event in New York City,” said Jean Ashton, the society’s executive vice president and director of its library, which has so far amassed several hundred Occupy-related artifacts. “We want to make sure that people understand what happened here.”

Other archivists are collecting some of the explosion of digital materials by and about Occupy. New York University’s Tamiment Library has been recording the meetings of the movement’s Think Tank group and archiving the Web page of the New York group’s general assembly. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit Web site, and the Occupy Archive, a project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for the History of New Media, has been collecting material from Occupy sites beyond New York.

So far OccupyArchive has some 3,200 items relating to hundreds of occupations around the country, mostly gathered by volunteers who have scoured the Web for scans of meeting minutes, posters, Flicker photos and other material. “Many local occupations were quite good about keeping minute notes, agendas and that kind of thing,” Sharon Leon, the Rosenzweig’s director of public programs, said. “That will eventually be a rich archive for historians doing work on social movements and post-recession reaction on the left.”

But despite the profusion of material online some archivists say that the historical record of the future may have some gaping holes. While Twitter, Facebook and other social media have been crucial to the movement, the terms of use of most social media sites prevent anyone from publishing material harvested from them. “Look back at the Arab Spring,” said Howard Besser, an archivist at N.Y.U. and founder of Activist Archivists, a group created last fall to coordinate the collection of digital media relating to Occupy. “We actually have precious little that scholars can use to look at how things spread.”

Archiving efforts have also met some initial skepticism from the Occupy movement itself, though Mr. Besser said most people had overcome their wariness about collaborating with traditional institutions. “There are lots of people who don’t get the idea of archiving, but that’s true everywhere,” he said. “Most people, when it’s explained, are very quick to understand.”

Activist Archivists has worked with Occupy Wall Street’s archives working group to create a “Why Archive” postcard to distribute at future demonstrations. (The first of five bullet points: “Accountability. Archives collect evidence that can hold those in power accountable.”) The group has also worked to counter fears that material gathered by archivists could end up being used in legal actions against protesters. Mr. Besser said they were looking into training activists to use ObscuraCam, a technology developed by human rights groups that automatically obscures faces in photographs and videos.

“The archivist part of us says we want to grab everything of enduring value and keep it,” Mr. Besser said. “But the activist part says that we may not want to save certain things, or may not want the police to have access to certain things.”

In the meantime Occupy is also storing its own archive of hundreds of signs, posters, flyers and one-of-a-kind objects recovered after the eviction from Zuccotti Park, like banners for the camp’s kitchen and other facilities made out of orange plastic netting used by the police.

Anna Perricci, a member of the archives working group who is coordinating digital preservation efforts, said that it was important for Occupy to have an active part in curating its own history.

“There are a lot of other people recording the movement and telling its story,” she said. “But I also want to empower occupiers to help preserve what is being made while their story is unfolding.”

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/occupy-wall-street-from-the-streets-to-the-archives/