The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of the Belarusian Politics and Society Web Archive.
Screenshot from Human Rights Defenders for Free Elections, a ‘campaign aimed at evaluating the elections from the viewpoint of the Belarusian electoral legislation and international standards of free and democratic elections, as well as informing the Belarusian public and international community about the progress of the elections and results of observations.’
Developed by librarians at Harvard and Stanford Universities, and the University of Chicago — under the auspices of the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation — the Belarusian Politics and Society Web Archive exists to preserve material related to the 2020 presidential election campaign in Belarus and the events that followed. Its primary focus is on output of the opposition to President Alexander Lukashenko and of unofficial, pro-Lukashenko actors, including: non-governmental organizations, local news outlets, trade unions, cultural organizations, and individual cultural figures and activists. These materials are endangered either by the Belarusian regime itself taking action to suppress them, or by individuals responding to pressure from the regime to self-censor and remove materials from the Internet. The Belarusian Politics and Society Web Archive will provide stable and continuing availability of these ephemeral resources for current and future researchers.
Web Archives preserve vulnerable information that may disappear from the live web and capture the ways in which selected websites have evolved over time. The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Web Resources Collection Program is a collaborative collection development effort to build curated, thematic collections of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research at participating Libraries and beyond. Learn more about the Program and explore additional collections on the Confederation’s Archive-It page.