Web archives have been growing in popularity in Global North countries as a way of preserving a part of their political, cultural, and social life carried out online. However, its spread to other regions has been slower because of several technical, economic, and social barriers. In this presentation, we will discuss the main limitations in the uptake of web archiving in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries and its implications for the access and use of web archives.
The first barrier to web archiving in these countries is the lack of awareness of web archives among librarians and archivists. According to Scopus data from 2022, out of 909 documents with the words “web archiv*” on the title, abstract, or keywords, 10 papers are from Spanish-Speaking Latin American countries. In worldwide web archiving surveys, there are no initiatives from Latin America yet (D. Gomes et al., 2011; P. Gomes, 2020), and we could only identify 5 Latin American institutions on Archive-It, none of which had active public collections in 2022.
Another barrier is the cost of web archiving services like Archive-It, which can be unaffordable for many institutions in the region. Even if they can afford these services or use free tools, most web archiving software is created only in English and it does not smoothly support multilingual collections or collections in languages other than English (for example, the default metadata fields for collections and seeds are in English and adding them in other languages is not straightforward).
This unequal access to web archives between the Global North and South comes with the risk that Global North websites get preserved, organized, accessed, and used, while Latin America and other regions continue depending solely on third parties like the Internet Archive to preserve their websites.
A possible solution for raising awareness of web archives is developing workshops as well as mentorship programs for Latin American librarians and digital humanists looking to start with web archiving. For the linguistic barrier, translating the documentation of web archiving tools to other languages can be a first step to encourage their use in Latin America.
References
Gomes, D., Miranda, J., & Costa, M. (2011). A Survey on Web Archiving Initiatives. In S. Gradmann, F. Borri, C. Meghini, & H. Schuldt (Eds.), Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (pp. 408–420). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24469-8_41
Gomes, P. (2020). Map of Web archiving initiatives. Own work. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Web_archiving_initiatives_58632FR T.jpg
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