Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Library Releases Growing Coronavirus Web Archive Collection

Collection Includes 450 Web Archives Documenting COVID-19 Pandemic – “After collecting a wide variety of web content documenting the COVID-19 pandemic over the past two years, the Library of Congress is now making its growing Coronavirus Web Archive available to the public. The collection, which now includes 450 web archives, aims to balance government, science, business and policy content with human stories that will give future historians a sense of how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the daily lives of individuals, families and communities. The Library has been capturing coronavirus web content in many of its existing web collections since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, well before establishing a formal collection plan in June 2020. Since the Library is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, Library staff also nominated sites for that effort. For the Coronavirus Web Archive, a core team of 10 recommending officers representing a variety of skills, perspectives and subject matter expertise from across the Library have worked together to build a well-rounded collection. Additionally, international collections librarians and overseas offices made contributions to ensure that the COVID-19 pandemic is represented in a truly global collection…

The Library began building web archive collections in 2000 to gather web-based information that focused on specific themes or events as they unfolded. Over the past two decades, the Library’s web archive collections have grown to hold over 2.8 petabytes of data in over 21 billion files. With so much content published on the web, curators still cannot capture everything, so the Library has refined its collections process with a multidisciplinary, team-driven approach. The Coronavirus Web Archive team continues to seek good examples of items that represent how Americans and people from across the globe are responding to the pandemic. The collection includes topics such as containment efforts, legal responses, human resource approaches, virtual education methods, unemployment trends, and artistic responses to the global challenge…”

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.