The librarians of the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation have done it again! In March, the confederation launched Vaccination in Modern America: Misinformation vs. Public Health Advocacy Web Archive, which will focus on preserving webpages that represent the current state of public discourse and contrasting approaches to authority on vaccination in the United States. The archive will include a focus on sites that are both pro – and anti-vaccine. According to the Libraries Spotlight Blog, The purpose of this collection is to capture potentially ephemeral information about vaccination that could be used by health service researchers, information scientists, sociologists, and others to understand the motivations, practices, and outcomes of health information and information on the web.
Why is this exciting? Web archives preserve vulnerable information that could disappear from the live web and capture the ways in which selected websites have evolved over time. In other words, this collection will help capture at-risk web content which will help support research at participating libraries and beyond.
This post was written by Paige Scudder, Research and Education Librarian for the Biomedical Libraries.
