What can we learn from URLs? Understanding the scope of COVID-19 web archive collections for transnational analyses

In this chapter, the results of a comparative study about COVID-19 web archive collections at the IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium) and the national libraries of Luxembourg, Hungary, France, the UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands are presented. The pandemic provided an opportunity to analyse the way in which an unforeseen event is taken into account by European web archives in the face of an emergency. The study was based on a collaboration between web archivists, academic researchers, and data scientists in 2020 with the aim of assessing how to make use of seed lists and accompanying metadata provided by the archival institutions. This chapter assesses the usefulness of the URLs that were provided in understanding the scope of COVID-19 web archive collections from the point of view of two fictional profiles, a researcher and a web archivist, who both focus on specific use cases. The chapter discusses what insights metadata can provide about the scope of the COVID-19 web collections in order to, on the one hand, compile a transnational corpus (researcher profile) and on the other, analyse one’s own web archiving policies for emergency collecting by comparing them with the metadata of other web archiving institutions (web archivist profile).