Report: “UC Berkeley Archives Websites at Risk of Erasure by Taliban”

From The Daily Californian:

The UC Berkeley Library began a project Aug. 15 to archive websites at risk of erasure under Taliban rule.

Librarian for East European Central Asian studies collections Liladhar Pendse initiated the project when the Taliban first breached the presidential palace in Kabul, according to Pendse and campus South Asia curator and cataloger Adnan Malik.

“The arrival of the Taliban in Kabul suggested that these websites might get taken down, and the artists, journalists and social activists that were based in Afghanistan and their tweets might disappear from public view or even get sanctioned,” Pendse said in an email. “Our goal was not to prevent the impossible, but to selectively crawl and preserve the websites that could be potentially taken down.”

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Pendse and Malik added that some of the archived websites have been made private to protect identities from Taliban retaliation. As of press time, the library has archived 83 websites.

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See Also: The Collection of Archived Websites is Available via Archive-It

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Libraries, News