Collecting in a Crisis: Rapid Response Web and Social Media Archiving

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI), in collaboration with the National Archives, Ireland (NAI), is hosting an online webinar on rapid response web and social media archiving as part of our ongoing public lecture series on digital archiving. 

Digital archivists have played an essential role on the front lines of the effort to document the pandemic as it plays out online. Their continuous collaborative efforts will ensure that records of the social, cultural, and economic impact of this crisis are preserved for the benefit of future generations.

In this webinar, we will hear from:

•  Nicola Bingham, Lead Curator for Web Archives at the British Library. Nicola will describe the work of the UK Web Archive, a partnership of six UK Legal Deposit Libraries that has been collecting websites reflecting the UK perspective of the COVID-19 Pandemic. 
•  Valerie Love, Senior Digital Archivist at Alexander Turnbull Library (a division of the National Library of New Zealand): Valerie will give an overview of the work that the Library’s Digital Collecting and Legal Deposit teams have been doing to collect and preserve public responses to the crisis on social media platforms. 

The talks will be followed by a short question and answer session. We hope that this webinar will provide an opportunity for archivists and librarians to learn from each other as part of an international cross-collaborative conversation on rapid response collecting. This webinar will also be of interest to anyone wishing to learn about how our shared digital cultural memory is safeguarded in a time of crisis. The event will take place over Zoom Webinar and registration is free.