Ernest (“Erik”) Zitser is the Librarian for Slavic and East European Studies, library liaison to the International Comparative Studies (ICS) Program, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University.

The newly launched Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union Web Archive is a collaborative effort to build a curated, thematic collection of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research about this area of the world.

In recent years, this turbulent region has produced a significant volume of websites likely to be of value to contemporary and future humanities, social science, and history projects, and the archive was established as an attempt to identify, capture, and preserve this material.

The thematic and generic scope of the archive is deliberately broad, and includes websites published by political parties, non-governmental organizations and activist groups, artists and cultural collectives, as well as individual historians, philosophers, and other intellectuals.

Campaign Against Homophobia (Poland)

Memorial Society (Russia)

Party of United Democrats (Macedonia)

The Archive represents an effort to preserve research-valuable web content from Eastern Europe and the territories of the Former Soviet Union by a group of research librarians responsible for that part of the world. This cooperative collecting initiative was developed, and is being curated by Russian and East European Studies librarians at Columbia, Princeton, Yale, New York and Duke Universities, as well as the New York Public Library, as part of the Web Resources Collection Program of the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation.

Know of an endangered website from the region? Please use this online form to nominate a website for inclusion in the Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union Web Archive.