UBC Library creates COVID-19 web archives to document pandemic response in BC
4 August, 2021
“We are trying to capture content that is in danger of disappearing,” says Larissa Ringham, Digital Project Librarian at UBC Library’s Digital Initiatives. Over the past year, a team at UBC Library has been creating web archives to preserve materials relating to the COVID-19 pandemic response in British Columbia for future research.
UBC Library began web archiving publicly available content in 2013, when the Canadian federal government set out to streamline and simplify access to information on government websites. One technique used to effect this change was to reduce redundant, outdated and trivial (ROT) content.
“Unfortunately there was a lot of important content on these websites that wasn’t transferred,” says Susan Paterson, Government Publications Librarian at Koerner Library, who spearheaded the project. “Because so much of government information is produced digitally, or is born digital, web archiving is the prime way of doing any kind of digital collection development and preservation.”
Working in partnership with several other universities across Canada, Ringham and Paterson set up the Federal Government Websites collection to preserve some of that information before it was lost, with “the theory that lots of copies keep [information] safe. We didn’t want all these websites preserved on a single government server as this can impact accessibility,” says Paterson. Since that initial project, they have launched 15 other projects with more than 3 terabytes of captured web data to date.
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