Why Archive Blogs?

At the Expatriate Archive Centre, we regard blogs as a type of diary. Since these writings are digital, they are also vulnerable. Blogs started by expats are often meant to transmit stories and other information from foreign homes. However, there are many reasons why a blog may cease to exist: the blogger may stop writing while still abroad or when they move to another location, or a blog may evolve into a different purpose once the creator repatriates, among other possibilities; rarely is there discussion about what happens to this particular type of blogs once they are created or finished. We want to preserve these blogs and their contents because we recognise their cultural and historical value.

Adding a blog archive to our collection will enrich the research opportunities for students and other academics who choose the EAC as a place of study. Archived blogs are selected based on specific criteria, and we check their quality regularly. Of course, we cannot preserve all blogs or even all the blogs that may fall within our parameters for this particular project. For now we focus on English-language blogs but hope to include other languages in the future.

This archival collection will grow over time. It will cover countries, nationalities and demographics that are currently missing in our holdings. It will also become a collection that can be accessed wherever a researcher is, unlike the EAC’s physical collection. To learn more about the possibility of researching with us, head over to our Research page.

As we published in a blog post about this project, the Digital Preservation Coalition regards blogs and blog comments as a ‘vulnerable’ digital species. The EAC encourages bloggers to archive their work, regardless of whether they participate in our project.

If we don’t start archiving blogs now, we risk their total disappearance and will have little written material that would document our digital lives.