Screenshot of video appeal by residents of Perm, Russia, protesting the construction of a railway
The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of the Video Appeals to the President of Russia web archive, preserving online videos created as direct appeals to Vladimir Putin by various groups and individuals in the Russian Federation and a number of other countries. The videos contain requests for the president’s direct involvement in resolving local and national social, economic, legal and environmental problems, assessment of Putin’s leadership, advice to him, and birthday wishes. The archive covers a variety of topics, such as politics, housing, legal battles, local administration, medical care, cultural institutions, labor disputes, economic conditions, alcoholism, animal cruelty, etc. The appeals are recorded by people of all ages and all social, ethnic and professional groups. Collectively these videos present a strikingly candid narrative of everyday life in Russia under V.V. Putin. The web archive is an initiative developed by librarians at Harvard University and Princeton University, under the auspices of the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation.
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 Collecting 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. Learn more about the Program and explore additional collections on the Confederation’s Archive-It page.