Archiving the 2015 Nepal Earthquake
Gary Hausman · 2016
Research Question: Spur of the moment web archiving is near impossible for most libraries or individual scholars to manage. Most projects need to be planned out months or years in advance. This paper discusses an ongoing project to archive web traces of the April 2015 Nepal earthquake using the tool Archive-It. We discuss both the merits and challenges of this recent project, and suggest that the growing field of disaster management should incorporate web archiving methods of preparation along with more standard techniques of on the ground physical forms of preparation. Successful web archiving demands rapid response to various questions—social, technical, legal (concerning copyright), political—that can best be addressed by long term preparation. Drawing from our own recent attempts to grapple with such challenges, we provide lessons for future projects. Data and Methods: This project started with a faculty request to web archive and preserve Internet resources relating to the 2015 Nepal earthquake. Since Columbia University libraries already has established protocols for collaborative spontaneous event collecting, Columbia University Library and Yale University Library teamed up (with assistance from Archive-It Partner Services) to select URLs, social media sites, and blog postings for web archiving. The Bodleian Library (at the University of Oxford) later joined as a third contributor. The results of our 2015 Nepal Earthquake project include (as of June 30, 2015) 107 web capture links: https://archiveit.org/collections/5764 Our criteria for selection emphasized non-US sources, digital ephemera, personal blogs of key actors, resources that might not be archived via other endeavors, and items that seemed free of copyright infringement. Results: We consider this to have been a relatively successful project. Yet, owing to lack of immediate preparation, the archived results missed the first few days immediately following the earthquake. In addition to discussing the background of our own decision making regarding this project, we will review the Nepal disaster literature for other projects that might benefit by incorporating technologies of web archiving. We will also explore potential methods of making web archiving of disasters more of a routine, rather than simply spontaneous, tool of collection management in the Himalayan region.