Now Available: Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union Web Archive

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation has launched the Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union Web Archive. The archive — which is now freely available for public use — preserves at-risk web content determined to be of lasting scholarly interest and includes websites published by a diversity of Slavic sources such as NGOs, artists, activists, intellectuals, and political parties.

Web users encounter 404 not found errors due either to broken links (which fail to route to extant URLs) or to rotten links (when the URL has disappeared). Archives like those curated by the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation preserve web content regardless of URL viability and allow users to track how captured pages have changed over time. 
Other Confederation archives include the Latin American and Caribbean Contemporary Art Web Archive, the Global Webcomics Web Archive, and the Queer Japan Web Archive. The archives will incorporate additional content on an ongoing basis, and users can suggest websites for inclusion via links on the archives’ launch pages.

The Penn Libraries play an active role in the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, regularly collaborating with librarians from twelve partner institutions: Brown University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Stanford University, and Yale University.

More information about the Confederation as well as a full list of the Confederation’s collaborative web collections can be found here.