Belarusian Politics and Society Web Archive: Preserving the Belarusian Grassroots Protest

Abstract

Belarusian Politics and Society (BPAS) is a curated web archive created under the auspices of the Ivy Plus Library Confederation to preserve online grassroots content created in, or related to, Belarus since 2020. The article describes the historical context of the creation of BPAS (focusing on the events in Belarus in 2020–2022 and particularly, the role of online media) and the web archiving context (by exploring Internet Archive’s coverage of Belarus) as well as demonstrates how both contexts guided the curatorial work on BPAS and the decision to focus the scope of collection on fragile grassroots content. Special attention is given to the issue of content loss and content shift in the Belarusian internet.