Web Archiving Across Borders: International Cooperation, Civil Society, and Euro-Mediterranean Perspectives
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Conference papersAbstract
I participate in this Round Table through the lens of my research on web archiving as a form of born-digital heritage. The first objective is to highlight this still little-known heritage, recognized by UNESCO in 2003, at a time when an essential part of the memory of European societies is now produced and shared through websites and social media platforms. Preserving and studying this heritage is not merely a technical challenge. It requires close cooperation among researchers, archivists, IT specialists, and civil society actors. Such collaboration is already well established at the European level through RESAW (Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials), founded in 2012 by Niels Brügger (Univ. Aarhus, DK). Looking ahead, international cooperation is essential to facilitate the integration of new researchers and emerging web archiving institutions into these expert communities. Scholars have repeatedly pointed out that web archives and web archive studies remain strongly shaped by the predominance of the Global North. In response to this challenge, the WebLab, a research platform dedicated to web archiving based at the MMSH (Aix-Marseille University) and supported by TELEMMe, is developing collaborations with partners in the MENA region . In many of these countries, robust institutional web archiving initiatives are still lacking, while important preservation efforts have emerged from civil society, particularly to document protest movements, political transitions, and armed conflicts. In this regard, the Syrian case has represented a major turning point in the development of cooperation between Europe and the MENA region. There is also a need to strengthen connections with civil society across the Euro-Mediterranean area by involving citizens more actively in the identification, collection, and preservation of this largely overlooked digital heritage.
