Just Launched: LGBTQ+ Communities of the Former Soviet Union & Eastern Europe Web Archive

This post first appeared on the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation blog. 

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of the LGBTQ+ Communities of the Former Soviet Union & Eastern Europe Web Archive, curated by librarians at Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and the University of Chicago, in partnership (as the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation) with New York University, the New York Public Library, and Library of University of California Berkeley. The collection archives a broad range of websites maintained by and for the benefit of LGBTQ+ communities in the independent countries of the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. These websites document news, events, and issues within these diverse communities, and often provide helpful information about where to seek health, legal, and other assistance in their countries of origin. The collection provides a crucial gathering point for archiving such resources, for the benefit of researchers present and future, and of course for the communities themselves both in the homelands and the diaspora.

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 or explore the collections here.