Just launched: the Global Social Responses to COVID-19 Web Archive!

We are pleased to announce that the Global Social Responses to COVID-19 Web Archive has been launched. Created in March 2020 at the onset of the pandemic — and curated by 29 librarians throughout the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation and beyond — the Archive documents regional, social responses to the pandemic, which are critical in understanding the scope of the pandemic’s humanitarian, socioeconomic, and cultural impact. With an emphasis on websites produced by underrepresented ethnicities and stateless groups, the Archive covers (but is not limited to): sites published by non-governmental organizations that focus on public health, humanitarian relief, and education; sites published by established and amateur artists in any realm of cultural production; sites published by local news sources; sites published by civil society actors and representatives; and relevant blogs and social media pages. At the time of its launch, the Archive featured over 2,000 websites from over 80 countries in over 50 languages.

You can access the collection in Archive-It here: https://archive-it.org/collections/14022.

For more information about the Global Social Responses to COVID-19 Web Archive (including a full list of curators), see: libguides.princeton.edu/covid-ivy.

For a blog post that may be redistributed across the Confederation and beyond, please see the following: https://ivpluslibraries.org/2021/03/iplc-launches-the-global-social-responses-to-covid-19-web-archive/.

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Web Collecting Program is an initiative of the Confederation’s Collection Development Group, under the direction of the Web Collecting Advisory Committee and Samantha Abrams, the Web Resources Collection Librarian. If you have questions about the Global Social Responses to COVID-19 Web Archive (or if you’d like to get involved by proposing one of your own collections), please reach out to ivyplusweb@library.columbia.edu.

I hope you’ll join me in recognizing those (copied here) involved in making this important resource available to researchers and the general public: Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, Ellen Ambrosone, Yuusuf Caruso, Paloma Celis Carbajal, Stuart Dawrs, Charlotte Giles, Glaudia Götze-Sam, Tristan Hinkel, Bogdan Horbal, Lunja Jeschke, Thomas Keenan, Ksenya Kiebuzinski, Miree Ku, Joshua Kueh, Hyoungbae Lee, Heather Martin, Brandon Miliate, Brendan Nieubuurt, Setsuko Noguchi, Liladhar Pendse, Anna Rakityanskaya, Deborah Schlein, Joshua Seufert, Alain St. Pierre, Sean Swanick, Amy Torres, Gudrun Wirtz, Ryan Wolfson-Ford, and Lou Zhou.

Source: Samantha Abrams, Columbia University Libraries. Posted by Liladhar Pendse- participant-curator in the archival project (UC Berkeley Library).