In March 2022, our library joined the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation web archiving project, Belarusian Politics and Society, as a co-partner.
Rakityanskaya, Anna. Belarusian Politics and Society Web Archive: Preserving the Belarusian Grassroots Protest. Journal of Belarusian Studies, 27 Mar 2023.
The purpose of the archive is to preserve websites, social media content and other electronic content related to the 2020 presidential election and the events of the following months and years. Its primary focus is on the output of the opposition to President Alexander Lukashenko and of unofficial, pro-Lukashenko actors, including non-governmental organisations, local news outlets, trade unions, cultural organisations, and individual cultural figures and activists.
In 2022, the war in Ukraine has become the main concern for the Belarusian pro-democracy groups and diaspora, and as such is reflected in the web output of those actors.
These materials are endangered either by the Belarusian regime itself taking action to suppress them or by individuals responding to pressure from the regime to self-censor and remove materials from the Internet. This Archive will provide stable and continuing availability of these ephemeral resources for current and future researchers.
The Belarusian Politics and Society Web Archive is curated by librarians at Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of Chicago, and the Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library and Museum, under the auspices of the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation.
All content archived here automatically becomes available in the Internet Archive too.
To nominate sites and other resources for inclusion in the web archive, please use an electronic form. You can suggest as many resources and as often as you wish. All proposals are evaluated for relevance to the topic, duplication of already archived resources, copyright and suitability for electronic archiving (e.g. we will not be able to archive content from Facebook and Instagram, but we can – from Telegram). If you have any questions, please contact us.
The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation brings together libraries from 13 USA universities to collaborate in various areas of information management.