Get Involved in Web Archiving Street Art

By CDG Street Art Collection Co-Leads Ricardo Basílio, Web curator, Arquivo.pt & Miranda Siler, Web Collection Librarian, Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation

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Street art is ephemeral and so are the websites and web channels that document it. For this reason the IIPC’s Content Development Working Group is taking up the challenge of preserving web content related to street art. Some institutions already do this locally, but a representative web collection of street art with a global scope is lacking.

Street art can be found all over the world and reflects social, political and cultural attitudes. The Web has become the primary means of dissemination of these works beyond the street itself. Thus, we are asking for nominations for web content from different parts of the globe to be preserved in time and to serve for study and research in the future.

Mural. Author: Douglas Pereira (Bicicleta Sem Freio). Title: The Observatory. WOOL, Covilhã Urban Art, 2019 (Portugal). Photo credit: Ricardo Basílio.

What we want to collect

Stencil. Author: Adres, WOOL, Covilhã Urban Art, 2017 (Portugal). Photo credit: Ricardo Basílio.

This collaborative collection aims to collect web content related to street art as a social, political, and cultural manifestation that can be found all over the world.

The types of street art covered by this collection include but are not limited to:

• Mural art
• Graffiti
• Stencil art
• Fly-posting (gluing posters)
• Stickering
• Yarn-bombing
• Mosaic

The collection will also include a number of different types of websites such as:

• Image collections/Databases (ex: https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net/)
• Blogs (ex: https://www.bombingscience.com/)
• Artist(s) websites (ex: https://www.space-invaders.com/home/)
• Forums (ex: https://forum.12ozprophet.com/forum/2-graffiti-photos-discussion/)
• News (ex: https://www.bbc.com/news/51628295)
• Non-profit organizations/NGO sites (ex: https://streetartmankind.org/)
• Social media (ex: https://twitter.com/globalstreetart)
• Governmental/Institutional
• Commercial

The list is not exhaustive and it is expected that contributing partners may wish to explore other sub-topics within their own areas of interest and expertise, providing that they are within the general collection development scope.

Out of scope

The following types of content are out of scope for the collection:

• For data budget considerations, websites that are heavy with audio video content such as YouTube will be deprioritised.
• Social media is labour intensive and unlikely to be archived successfully such as Facebook, YouTube channels, Instagram, TikTok.
• Content which is in the form of a private members’ forum, intranet or email (non-published material).
• Content which may identify or dox street artists who wish to remain anonymous or known only by their tagger name.
• Artist websites where the artist works primarily in mediums other than street art.

Media websites (tv/radio and online newspapers) will be selected in moderation, as generally this type of content is being archived elsewhere, although nominations at the level of the news article documenting specific debates around street art may be considered (as opposed to media landing pages or splash pages). Independent news sources devoted to street art specifically are welcome.

How to get involved

Once you have looked over the collection scope document and selected the web pages that you would like to see in the collection, it takes less than 2 minutes to fill in the submission form:

https://bit.ly/CDG-street-art-public-nominations

For the first crawl, the call for nominations will close on January 20, 2023. 

For more information and updates, you can contact the IIPC Content Development Working Group team at Collaborative-collections@iipc.simplelists.com or follow the collection hashtag on Twitter at #iipcCDG.

Resources

About IIPC collaborative collections

IIPC CDG updates on the IIPC Blog