The Global Social Responses to Covid-19 Web Archive contains a broad range of websites related to Covid-19 that are maintained by residents of Africa; East Asia; Eastern Europe, Russia, and other territories of the Former Soviet Union; Latin America and the Caribbean; the Middle East and North Africa; Oceania; and South and Southeast Asia. The Archive — as of its launch in March 2021 — is the largest collection maintained by the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation's (IPLC) Web Collecting Program, with over 2,000 websites from over 80 countries and in over 50 languages. Efforts have been made to archive websites produced by underrepresented ethnicities and stateless groups in all parts of the world. Broadly speaking, the collection focuses on social responses to the covid-19 crisis, as represented in local news, NGOs, art, blogs and social media, and popular movements, rather than national news and national government initiatives, though there are some exceptions.
The recent onset of the global pandemic is constantly evolving in anticipated and unanticipated ways. Collecting regional social responses to the pandemic is critical for creating an archive that captures the scope of the pandemic’s humanitarian, socioeconomic, and cultural impact.
The collection proposed for the Ivy Plus initiative is the outcome of coordination with the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), which has created the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) collection, and the Library of Congress, which has ongoing web-archiving efforts for Covid-19 and other topics. The coordination with these web-archiving initiatives has manifested differently across the regions in the Ivy Plus collection, and each tab on the libguide can provide more information related to each area.
The Ivy Plus web archive has created a record of the evolution of Covid-19’s social impact since March 2020. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
The websites in the collection have been described by category, organization type, and optionally by format. Category describes what the website is about in relation to Covid-19. Organization type denotes who created the content. Format describes how the content is arranged, e.g. article, video, statistics, etc. Researchers can discover the specific content of interest by browsing according to coverage by region, language, or any of the facets just described. If you have questions about how to find relevant websites for your research, please reach out to any of the collection curators.
Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez (Princeton University)
Ellen Ambrosone (Princeton University)
Yuusuf Caruso (Columbia University)
Paloma Celis Carbajal (New York Public Library)
Stuart Dawrs (University of Hawaii)
Charlotte Giles (Library of Congress)
Claudia Götze-Sam (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin)
Tristan Hinkel (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin)
Bogdan Horbal (New York Public Library)
Lunja Jeschke (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)
Thomas F. Keenan (Princeton University)
Ksenya Kiebuzinski (University of Toronto)
Miree Ku (Duke University)
Joshua Kueh (Library of Congress)
Hyoungbae Lee (Princeton University)
Heather Martin (Duke University)
Brandon Miliate (Yale University)
Brendan Nieubuurt (University of Michigan)
Setsuko Noguchi (Princeton University)
Liladhar Pendse (University of California, Berkeley)
Anna Rakityanskaya (Harvard University)
Deborah Schlein (Princeton University)
Joshua Seufert (Princeton University)
Alain St. Pierre (Princeton University)
Sean Swanick (Duke University)
Amy Torres (Princeton University)
Gudrun Wirtz (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)
Ryan Wolfson-Ford (Library of Congress)
Luo Zhou (Duke University)
With support from Samantha Abrams, Web Resources Collection Librarian (Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation).
The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is a voluntary union of 13 sovereign academic libraries: Brown University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University and Yale University.
For the benefit of current and future scholars globally, the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation leverages its collective assets to improve discovery of and access to information, and its innovative use at scale for the creation of new knowledge, and exercises collective action and leadership in helping shape the discourse and scholarly communication, and the outcomes of that discourse.
An initiative of the Confederation, the Web Resources Collection Program is a collaborative collection development effort to build curated, thematic collections of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research at participating Libraries and beyond. All thirteen Confederation members participate in the Program.
To learn more about the Confederation and the Web Resources Collection Program, visit https://ivpluslibraries.org.
Web archiving is the process of creating and storing copies (or snapshots) of live websites to ensure that they are preserved and remain publicly accessible for future use. Sites are typically captured using automated web crawlers, which systematically identify and follow hyperlinks on selected websites (referred to as seeds), copying and storing information as they work.
For more information, see: What is a Web Archive? a short video from the UK Web Archive.
Though the Confederation attempts to create complete copies of each website it collects, web crawlers can struggle to capture more dynamic portions of the web. Examples of challenging content include: Javascript-driven navigation menus, streaming audio and video, and database-driven content. In addition, web crawlers deployed on behalf of the Confederation do not collect password-protected portions of websites; only publicly available content has been crawled.
If you have questions about the Confederation's Web Collecting Program, please email ivyplusweb@library.columbia.edu.
