By Kees Teszelszky, Curator Digital Collections, Koninklijke Bibliotheek – National Library of The Netherlands and Lead Curator, CDG Climate Change Collection
Climate change is one of the most urgent and hotly debated issues on the web in recent years. The IIPC Content Development Group is inviting all curators and web archivists from around the world to contribute websites to a new collaborative “Climate Change” collection.
In recent decades there is has been strong evidence that the earth is experiencing rapid climate change, characterized by global temperature rise, warming oceans, shrinking ice sheets, glacial retreat, decreased snow cover, sea level rise, declining arctic sea ice, extreme weather events, and ocean acidification. Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that these climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position (source: climate.nasa.gov/evidence). Global and local action to mitigate this crisis has been complicated by political, economic, technical, cultural, and religious debates.
Many people feel the urge to reflect on this topic on the web. We would like to take an international snapshot of born digital culture relating to documentation of and social debate on the challenging issue of climate change. You can contribute to this collection by nominating web content about any aspect of climate change, and the content can be focused on specific countries or cultures or have a global focus, and can be in any language.
We especially welcome contributions from underrepresented countries, cultures, languages and other groups, or those countries without IIPC members. Curators currently building climate change related collections at their own institutions are welcome to contribute their seeds (matching below criteria) to help us build a collection with an international perspective.
Examples of subtopics might include climatology, climate change denial, climate refugees, religious reflections on climate change, etc. Eligible types of web content include organizational reports or statements (i.e. from government agencies, NGOs, scientific or academic institutions, advocacy groups, political parties/platforms, businesses, religious groups) or more personal forms such as blogs or artistic projects.
Out of scope are: social media feeds (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube channels, WhatsApp), video (YouTube, Vimeo), apps and other content which is difficult or impossible to crawl.
Collecting seeds started on 1 April 2019 and more nominations can be added to this spreadsheet. Crawls will be run during the summer of 2019, to conclude shortly after the upcoming UN Climate Action Summit on 23 September 2019.
Organized by the IIPC and supported by web archivists around the world, the special web collection ‘Climate Change’ is one of the ways the IIPC helps raise awareness of the strategic, cultural and technological issues which make up the web archiving and digital preservation challenge.
For more information about this collection contact Kees Teszelszky for more details: kees.teszelszky[at]kb.nl
