The South Asia section has been curated by Ellen Ambrosone (Princeton University) and Charlotte Giles (Library of Congress); we have also received the support of student volunteer Arnab Sircar (Unionville High School).
The Ivy Plus curators of the collection established a division of labor between the Ivy Plus collection and the Covid-19 collection developed at the Library of Congress (LC) based on both content and technological capability at the start of the project. Researchers should use the collections in tandem in order to discover Covid-19-related content from and about South Asia.
The Ivy Plus collection focuses heavily on the activities of NGOs, grassroots efforts, artistic manifestations, large and small South Asian news sources, blog posts and social media (YouTube only at present), and other relevant topics as needed. At present, there are more than 1,300 sites set to be crawled, and a subset of these sites will be available at the time of launch. Researchers should continue to check the collection as new sites will be added frequently. If you would like to suggest a link for the collection, you can do so by filling out the Google form at this link.
Broadly speaking, the subject areas for the LC Covid-19 collection include government information, social and cultural impacts, scientific material, personal narratives and everyday life with a primary focus on the US. The South Asia-related archives include government sites, major SA news sources, amongst others. LC has a year-long embargo policy for the sites that it crawls, and researchers should bear this in mind when trying to access the LC-crawled sites. Researchers should explore both the LC Covid-19 web archive and their general web archive catalog to discover Covid-19-related sites.
Technologically speaking, Ivy Plus has the ability to crawl YouTube, so YouTube videos from major news outlets that one may anticipate to be part of LC's web archiving efforts, may be found in the Ivy Plus collection.
In addition to the LC Covid-19 collection, there are other web archives that intersect either topically or temporally with the Ivy Plus collection. These include the following:
Cornell's web archive of NGOs in Nepal (ongoing)
LC's Kashmir Legal Status 2019 web archive (This collection was crawled into June 2020 and contains covid-related content.)
LC's Indian Political and Social Issues web archive (ongoing)
Ivy Plus India's Citizenship Amendment Act Protest Movements web archive
The South Asia section of the Global Social Responses to Covid-19 Web Archive has benefited from suggested links by a generous and knowledgeable South Asian Studies community. You can see a list of contributors by clicking this link. If you are interested in contributing by recommending a website, you can do so via this Google form or by emailing the curators directly. We offer our sincerest thanks for the contributors' time and care.
