EAC Blog Archive

About the Blog Archive

We live our lives online at an increasing pace, and this is especially true for expatriates. Through social media and other Internet-based platforms, expatriates are able to stay connected with their home countries, friends abroad, and various communities. However, these digital connections can be fleeting. Many turn to blogging as a way of sharing their experiences, yet these blogs are often vulnerable to disappearing. The authors may stop writing, move to a new location, or repurpose their blogs once they repatriate. Rarely is there any discussion about the fate of these blogs after they cease to be active.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) considers blogs and blog comments critically endangered (see DPC’s Bit List). Digital materials are listed as Critically Endangered when they face material technical challenges to the preservation, there are no agencies responsible for them or those agencies are unwilling or unable to meet preservation needs. This classification includes Endangered materials in the presence of aggravating conditions.

At the EAC, we recognise the cultural and historical value of these digital diaries and have launched the EAC Blog Archive project to ensure they are preserved for future generations.

Adding a blog archive to our collection also enriches 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. We focus on English-language blogs for now, but we hope to include other languages in the future. We intend to grow this collection over time. It will cover countries, nationalities, and demographics currently missing from our holdings. It will also become a collection that can be accessed wherever a researcher is.

We encourage 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.

Selection Criteria

To be considered for this project, a blog must meet a few basic criteria:

• The blogger must be or have been an expatriate. The EAC defines an expatriate as someone who lives temporarily in a country other than their home country;
• The blog must have content spanning at least two years;
• The blog must be written in English;
• The blog must be currently online, though it does not have to be active.

We also assess and select blogs based on the quality of the writing and the relevance of the content to the project. We are interested in blogs with content that centres on the daily lives and everyday experiences of expatriates in their adopted place (e.g. activities, family, challenges and successes, dealing with bureaucracy/healthcare, misadventures, new experiences, contrasts with previous home places, etc.).

Additionally, blogs can discuss or focus on topics adjacent to expatriation, such as repatriation or Third Culture Kids. We are collecting only English-language blogs for testing purposes but hope to expand the scope of languages we include in the future. 

The scheduled frequency of captures for active blogs is twice a year. Since the quality of writing is essential for this project, we review blogs on an occasional basis to ensure that the content remains relevant and aligned with the objectives and criteria for this project. If a blog no longer fits our criteria - e.g. if a blogger repatriates and no longer writes about living abroad - we may stop archiving that blog. If this is the case, we will inform bloggers about this decision.