Just Launched: The Student and Youth Environmental Activism 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 Student and Youth Environmental Activism Web Archive.

The Student and Youth Environmental Activism Web Archive — an initiative developed by Kris Kasianovitz (Stanford University), James Kessenides (Yale University), and Joshua Lupkin (Harvard University), under the auspices of the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation — documents youth and student engagement in climate change and environmental issues from around the globe beginning in 2019. It contains websites and online documents created by individuals, groups, organizations, and coalitions of student and youth-led environmental activism. For the purposes of this collection, students and youth are defined as those who are in primary, secondary, and tertiary schools, or whose age fall into these groups.

Development of this collection was inspired by a variety of student-led activities and protests, like Greta Thunberg’s 2018 Skolstrejk för klimatet, the March 14, 2019 school strikes for climate (also known as Fridays for Future), Youth for Climate, the Global Climate Strikes that took place during the Fall of 2019, and the United Nations Youth Climate Summit in 2019. Not included in this collection, but of importance for this topic, are Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media outlets, such as WhatsApp and Slack, where the work, images, and messaging of many groups takes places.

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 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 (link in the box above).