We were inspired to pull this COVID-19 collecting meetup together after lots of discussion was generated on the Australasia Preserves forum, in addition to worldwide statements from UNESCO and the International Council on Archives in collaboration with numerous organisations on the importance of digital heritage collection, access, and preservation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For this meetup, we were really fortunate to be joined by a few speakers in our region sharing their work on COVID-19 collecting. We had four short lightning talks, then lots of discussion/question time.
- State Library of Queensland – Catherine Cottle and David Allen (slides)
- Alexander Turnbull Library/National Library of New Zealand – Valerie Love (slides)
- New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) – Cassandra Gorton (transcript)
- State Library New South Wales – Matthew Burgess (slides)
Points of interest from the online chat and other shared resources
- Matthew Burgess’ proposed method for archiving emails (he’s looking for feedback on this)
- Conversations around ethics in social media collection came up, we discussed the differences between sectors and organisations (e.g. museum perspective contrasted with the differences that legislative mandates make to collection and access decisions for citizen-generated content)
- We touched on different approaches and processes for capturing donor permissions around what is being donated especially in terms of copyright and future use
- The National Library of Australia (NLA) has been proactively collecting online publications during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some sites are collected daily, some weekly and others monthly. List of webpage snapshots and collections
- Upcoming LIANZA Meetup, 20 May: Collecting in a time of COVID-19
- Somaya Langley’s callout on Twitter and Ed Summers’ response putting together a resource listing initiatives and tools to document COVID-19
- Presentations from the WARCnet kickoff meeting
- NLNZ github link featuring helper files / tips for social media harvesting
- NLA’s Indonesian office will pursue local collecting of ephemera and other published material once safe to do so. Pacific websites related to COVID-19 from Papua New Guinea, Fiji, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and Bougainville are being archived. The NLA has also contributed a seed list of Australian URLs to the IIPC’s international collection of COVID-19 related web materials, led by Columbia University and the Internet Archive
- Digital Preservation Coalition blog series on COVID-19 web archiving work:
- Harnessing the Crowd: Coronavirus Topical Collection at the UK Web Archive
- Catching an Avalanche with a Teaspoon: the Global Challenge of Web Archiving the Coronavirus Pandemic
- Capturing the UK Government Response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic at The National Archives UK
- If These WARCs Could Talk: Learning from Archived Web & Social Media Covid-19 Collections
The recording of the meetup can be viewed on the Australasia Preserves YouTube channel.
Image: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/covid-corona-coronavirus-virus-4948866/
