(11 Oct 2022) As the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in early 2020, librarians, archivists, and others with interest in preserving cultural heritage began documenting the personal, cultural, and societal impact of the global pandemic on their communities. These efforts included creating archival collections preserving physical, digital, and web-based records and information for use by students, scholars, and citizens. In response to this immediate need for archiving resources by both libraries and memory institutions, the Internet Archive’s Archive-It service launched a COVID-19 Web Archiving Special Campaign in April 2020 providing free and subsidized tools, training, and community support to institutions and local efforts to preserve web-published materials documenting the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 Web Archive builds on this curatorial work to gather together more than 160 web archive collections created by more than 125 libraries, archives, and cultural heritage organizations into a shared access portal built and maintained by the Internet Archive. The COVID-19 Web Archive currently totals nearly 90 terabytes of archived data composed of over 1.5 billion webpages and allows for full text, metadata, and media search within individual collections and across the entire archive. The archive will be continuously updated over time.
More information can be found from the original announcement here.
