Content Development Working Group

The Content Development Working Group (CDG) will pursue collaborative collections based on themes or events which converge with the following criteria:

  • Of high interest to IIPC members (it will be up to content development leaders and group to determine if there are enough people interested or who would like to be involved);

  • Do not map to any one member’s responsibility or mandate;

  • Of higher value to research because it represents more perspectives than similar collections in only one member archive would do;

  • Transnational in scope, but not necessarily “global”

In general, IIPC will aim to collect content from a variety of perspectives when developing its collections. In general, IIPC will aim to include relevant websites from many countries and in many languages when developing its collections. For potentially controversial topics (e.g. political or social conflicts) IIPC will aim to collect content from a variety of perspectives.

IIPC collaborative collections topics may overlap with the existing web archives of individual members, but topic proposals should acknowledge such overlaps and identify the added value created (e.g., public access, more comprehensive, broader perspectives).

Collections may be conceived either as open-ended (continuing to grow at a controlled pace over multiple years), or finite with a pre-specified duration (as with event-based collections). Multiple collections can be developed and maintained simultaneously, rather than solely having one active collection at a time. Due to potential limitations with budget/size of crawls, it is not expected that IIPC could undertake entire top-level domain crawls at this time.

Guidelines for New Collaborative Collections


The CDG is co-chaired by:
Nicola Bingham (The British Library), 2017-present
Alex Thurman (Columbia University Libraries), 2015-present

Past co-chairs:
Abbie Grotke (Library of Congress), 2015-2017

Collections


IIPC's collaborative collections are built using the Archive-It service from the Internet Archive.

Street Art (2023- ) 
Lead Curators: Miranda Siler, Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation & Ricardo Basilio, Arquivo.pt

War in Ukraine (2022- )
Lead Curators: Vladimir Tybin & Anaïs Crinière-Boizet, National Library of France & Kees Teszelsky, National Library of the Netherlands

 Afghanistan Regime Change (2021) and the International Response (2021-2022)
Lead Curator: Nicola Bingham, The British Library

 Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) (2020-2023)
Lead Curators: Alex Thurman, Columbia University Libraries & Nicola Bingham, The British Library

 Climate Change (2019)
Lead Curator: Kees Teszelszky, National Library of the Netherlands

 Artificial Intelligence (2019)
Lead Curator: Tiiu Daniel, National Library of Estonia

 Online News Around the World (2018)
Lead Curator: Sabine Schostag, Royal Danish Library

National Olympic and Paralympic Committees (2016- )
Lead Curators: Helena Byrne, British Library

Olympics/Paralympics collections (2010-2020)
Lead Curators: Helena Byrne, British Library (2016, 2018, 2022); 
Faryaneh Poursardar, Old Dominion University (2020)

 European Refugee Crisis (2015-2016)
Lead Curator: Sabine Schostag, Royal Danish Library

 World War One Commemoration (2015-2018)
Lead Curator: Peter Stirling, National Library of France

 Intergovernmental Organizations (2015- )
Lead Curator: Alex Thurman, Columbia University Libraries