COVID-19: Vancouver Island, BC (Central & North)

In March 2020 the Canadian Web Archiving Coalition (CWAC) stated: "The deadly flu outbreak of 1918-19 is often called the ‘forgotten pandemic.’ Our responsibility now is to ensure the lessons of COVID-19 are not forgotten. Our collective efforts to capture and preserve the essential online elements of this unprecedented event are critical." (CARL-ABRC). The COVID-19: Vancouver Island, BC (Central & North) Web Archive reflects community experiences and responses to the pandemic in the region served by Vancouver Island University, documenting and supporting diverse aspects of scholarly inquiry, creativity, and community life. The Web Archive is intended to provide a body of information that will support scholarship, creativity, and study. Information rights related to web archiving include considerations of copyright and fair dealing, and of individual and community privacy. The following are among principles and resources that guide web archiving decisions: Ethics of care, for example in VIU Library’s Pledge to our user communities; OCAP® principles, and awareness of relationality and accountability to Indigenous communities, and potential impacts related to web archiving; Good practice and expert advice, emerging and accessed through communities of practice, e.g. the Canadian Web Archiving Coalition (CWAC); and VIU Library, Evolution of Physical Collections: 2017-2021 VIU Library, Special Collections Guidelines (Under review 2020). Web archives are informed by available capture technologies and also by affordances of the content source; not all websites can be successfully crawled or rendered, and quality of archived versions varies. This project is supported by VIU's Special Funding for COVID-19 research projects and carried out in coordination with the University of Victoria’s COVID-19 Collection and the Canadian Web Archiving Coalition. Contact us at research.help@viu.ca with questions or for more information about content included in the Web Archive. [Working de