Columbia University Libraries is pleased to announce the launch of the Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union Web Archive, comprised of captured website content from Eastern Europe and the territories of the Former Soviet Union. In recent years, this area of the world has produced a significant volume of websites likely to be of value to contemporary and future humanities, social science, and history projects, and the archive has been established as an attempt to identify, capture, and preserve this material. The thematic and generic scope of the archive is deliberately broad, and includes websites published by political parties, non-governmental organizations and activist groups, artists and cultural collectives, and historians, philosophers, and other intellectuals.

Web archives preserve vulnerable information that may disappear from the live web and capture the ways in which selected websites have evolved over time. The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Web Collecting Program is a collaborative collection development effort to build curated, thematic collections of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research. Learn more about the program or explore the collections here.