Ukraine Conflict Collection: Web archive ensures site stability through crisis
March 11th, 2014
Screenshot of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism’s website, captured on March 1, 2014
On March 1st, a group of masked gunmen took over the offices of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism. Worried about the security of the institution’s web content, executive director of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, David E. Kaplan, contacted Roger Macdonald of the Internet Archive’s TV Archive, who contacted the Archive-It team. Within a few hours their website was being crawled as a part of Archive-It’s Ukraine Conflict spontaneous event collection. On March 7th this collection, and specifically the archived website of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism, was featured on WNYC’s program On the Media. You can hear what David E. Kaplan had to say about it here.
The purpose of Ukraine Conflict collection is twofold: to document events as they happen, and to ensure the stability of information in conflict, as evidenced by Center for Investigative Journalism site. The Archive-It team started the collection on February 26th and will continue to update and add new seeds as the situation unfolds. To date the collection has 30 sites including news outlets, blogs, social media, and government websites, nominated by subject matter experts in the fields of Investigative Journalism, Russian, and Eurasian studies. You can browse through the collection here.