New Online From Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation and Partners: “Global Social Responses to Covid-19 Web Archive”

The Global Social Responses to Covid-19 Web Archive is an initiative developed by librarians throughout the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation in partnership with librarians at Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Hawaii, the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto, and the University of Virginia.

Created in March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, 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 across and representatives; and relevant blogs and social media pages.

More From Archive Information Page (via Princeton University Library)

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:

• Sites published by NGOs that focus on public health, humanitarian relief, education, etc.
• Sites published by established and amateur artists in any realm of cultural production.
• Sites published by local regional language news sources.
• Sites published by other civil society actors and representatives.
• Blogs and social media pages.