The VidArch project is capturing YouTube videos and web pages associated with the 2008 U.S. presidential election. We are also exploring strategies and building tools for curators of digital collections to appraise and describe such materials. Blogs are an increasingly important source for documenting online deliberations. Blogs can provide commentary, but they can also serve as “contextual information bridges” for identifying and capturing resources to which the pages link.Web archiving literature usually defines collecting in terms of setting up a set of seeds for crawls based on specific URLs. However, a substantial portion of material on the Web is accessible through posing queries. Curators of digital collections will need tools and methods for combining information from queries and crawls to identify and collect materials. The VidArch project is developing and testing such approaches, in order to support what Hans Booms would call a “documentation plan” for reflecting the heterogeneous and interlinked conversation space surrounding contemporary events.