New Romance Web Archive

From Steve Ammidown (Manuscripts & Outreach Archivist, Browne Popular Culture Library):

Browne Popular Culture Library at BGSU and the University of Michigan Libraries have partnered to create a web archive meant to capture significant sites related to the romance genre. You can find it here: https://archive-it.org/collections/13215

This is still a work in process, and some sites are not listed yet due to some technical issues, but the idea is to capture both full sites and articles and other significant moments within the genre. If you look now, you’ll notice that there are many pages related to this winter’s RWA scandal, for example. We’ve also partnered with several sites to capture everything they’ve posted, including Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, the Fated Mates Podcast, All About Romance, WOC In Romance, and more. Our hope is to avoid a situation like what happened with the Romantic Times Book Review site, where only a portion of the important historical content on that site was captured before it disappeared.

Much of the credit for this project goes to Maura Seale at Michigan, who approached me with this idea last year [...] and took responsibility for managing the technical aspects.

I hope this becomes a valuable research resource for years to come. If you have sites that you think would be useful to capture, please feel free to reach out to Maura or myself. It’s worth pointing out that when it comes to capturing entire sites, we are doing it only with the consent of the site owners. There are several sites we approached who have asked us not to capture their content, and we’ll respect those wishes. That said, we’re happy to reach out to others if the research community thinks it’s worthwhile!

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This makes me so happy. Huge thanks to @mauraseale and her team for all their work. Hopefully this helps us avoid losing important pages and sites in the future. https://t.co/3oBOVsmHMj

— Steve Ammidown (@stegan) July 23, 2020

Here's the announcement to Twitter, which will help with contacting Steve and Maura. I've added a link in the Teach Me Tonight sidebar to this resource.