Lost Archives? Preservation of Ephemeral COVID-19 Data for Research

1. Introduction

The internet has revolutionized the way people access, create, and share information. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 disrupted commercial activities and restricted movement, requiring the web to serve as a vital global information and communication source. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a global surge in information dissemination through various digital platforms, including news media websites, social media, and dedicated health organization portals (Mcclain et al., 2021; Ferguson, Merga, & Winn, 2021; Wu, 2024). Although the web played a vital role in the dissemination of information and communication during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to note that it was also used as a tool to misinform, disinform and generally spread fake news and cause unnecessary panic prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare an ‘infodemic’ (WHO, 2020a). The impact of COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated researchers to strive to understand how it affected different aspects of society (Jaumotte, 2023; Sohrabi et al., 2021; Sindhwani, Kumar, & Saddikuti, 2022). In this context, preserving the vast amount of digital information generated during the pandemic has become increasingly important. Web archiving has emerged as a solution for preserving online content (Hendry & Stock, 2014). It involves the collection, storage, and retrieval of web pages to create an archive of online content (Vlassenroot et al., 2019). The archived pages can then be accessed later, preserving the original context and content. Web archiving is an important tool for digital preservation, providing an opportunity to preserve ephemeral online data for future generations. Therefore, the aim of this article is to discuss the preservation of ephemeral COVID-19 data, highlighting the significant sources of information during the pandemic, and assessing the efforts made to archive this critical information. The study also seeks to highlight the importance of web archiving for future research and digital history preservation, particularly in the context of public health crises. With this objective in mind, certain limitations and delimitations are outlined to set the scope of this paper. First, the paper highlights the importance of research on web archives, focusing specifically on COVID-19-related websites. This focus represents both a limitation and a deliberate delimitation, as it narrows the scope to a select number of websites rather than a comprehensive or representative sample. The selected websites are adequate to explain the concept of web archiving and underscore its significance for future research. This paper provides a descriptive overview of web archiving and its prospects, intended to benefit a wide range of interdisciplinary audiences. However, it does not cover technical aspects of web archiving, such as selection, appraisal, and curation. Additionally, the paper does not delve into the issue of online misinformation and fake news during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, the paper, which is largely descriptive, aims to illustrate the importance of web archiving and to stimulate further research in this field, particularly in the context of Africa.

2. Literature review

3. Methodology

The study adopted a qualitative research approach, utilizing web content analysis to explore the preservation of ephemeral COVID-19 data for future research. A selective approach was employed in the choice of websites, focusing on those from key organizations that played a critical role in disseminating COVID-19 information during the pandemic. Specifically, the study analyzed websites from the World Health Organization (WHO), Worldometers, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the South African Department of Health, and the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC). These websites were selected due to their authoritative status and their significant contributions to the global and regional response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, the World Health Organization (WHO) was included as a global leader in health emergencies, providing comprehensive and reliable data for international audiences. Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offered detailed and region-specific insights, making it an important source for analysis. To represent Africa, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the South African Department of Health were chosen, ensuring a balance between global and regional perspectives. These organizations’ frequent updates during the pandemic made their websites ideal for assessing the Wayback Machine’s ability to capture rapidly changing data. in addition, the accessibility of these sites through the Wayback Machine ensured the feasibility of conducting a detailed analysis. While many other websites contributed to COVID-19 information dissemination, this focused approach allows the study to emphasize web archiving’s potential and limitations, laying a foundation for future research that may include broader or less prominent sources.

Furthermore, the selective inclusion of these websites was justified by the need to assess how web archives can effectively preserve crucial data from leading health authorities and data aggregators. By concentrating on these specific sources, the study aimed to demonstrate the potential of web archiving tools, such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, in capturing and storing valuable digital content for future research. Data collection was conducted using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a powerful web archiving tool that captures and stores web pages for long-term access. Its extensive reach and accessibility make it a representative and reliable tool for studying web archiving in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its established credibility and widespread use in academic and research settings further justify its exclusive use in this study. In addition, the Wayback Machine effectively captures global and regional data, as evidenced by its archiving of key COVID-19 information sources such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as data from African health organizations.

The study focused on web pages archived during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, from January 20, 2020, to April 17, 2020, a period marked by the rapid spread of the virus and the implementation of global lockdown measures. The web content analysis examined the availability and frequency of archival of the selected websites, highlighting the importance of preserving these digital records for ongoing and future research. The study highlights the need for systematic preservation of COVID-19-related digital content, particularly from key health organizations, to ensure valuable data remains accessible for future analysis and research.

4. Limitations of the Wayback Machine for COVID-19 research

The use of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine as a tool for web archiving in the context of COVID-19 research has the potential to introduce biases and limitations that could affect the results of the study. One potential bias is the selection bias, which may occur if certain websites or web pages are not archived, or if the archiving process does not capture all the relevant information. This could lead to a biased sample of data, which could affect the findings of the study. For example, if the Wayback Machine only archived pages from certain types of media outlets, it could lead to a bias towards certain perspectives or narratives about the pandemic. Another potential limitation of using the Wayback Machine as a tool for web archiving is the lack of real-time data, which may not accurately reflect the current discourse and public opinion about the pandemic. For example, the Wayback Machine captures the pages at a specific point in time, and it may not include the most recent updates or discussions about the pandemic, which could lead to an incomplete understanding of the narrative evolution. Also, using the Wayback Machine as a tool for web archiving may also introduce technical limitations that could affect the data. For example, some web pages may not be archived correctly, or certain types of web pages may not be able to be archived at all. This could lead to missing data or errors in the data, which could affect the findings of the study. Thus, it is important to be aware of its potential biases and limitations of Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine when using it in the context of COVID-19 research. A critical examination of the tool and its potential impacts on the study’s findings should be done to ensure the reliability of the data and the conclusions derived from it.

5. Research Findings

This section presents the research findings from the study on the preservation of ephemeral COVID-19 data for research purposes. It details the significant sources of information during the COVID-19 pandemic, including prominent websites like those of the World Health Organization (WHO), Worldometer, the South African Department of Health, and the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC). These platforms were instrumental in disseminating timely and reliable COVID-19 data and guidance.

6. Assessment of Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996 with the purpose of building a digital library that offers permanent access to historical collections existing in digital form (Brown, 2006). The Internet Archive which currently contains a large amount of digital information such as documents, scholarly journals, TV programs, audio, and e-books (Boyle, 2016) is currently the largest Web archive in the world (Brown, 2006). The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine accessible through https://archive.org/web/ is an important tool of the Internet Archive as the access point for its archived contents. According to Brown (2006: 9-10), the Wayback Machine is “an innovative time-based index and interface which not only provides access to individual website snapshots but also allows them to be browsed through within historical context.” Therefore, the assessment of some COVID-19 related websites mentioned earlier is outlined below.

6.1 Websites captured by Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine

Table 1 shows the presence of the COVID-19 websites or webpages analyzed in this study on the Wayback Machine. The data collected through web content analysis of the individual web pages in the Wayback Machine shows that out of the five websites analyzed, they are all being archived by the Internet Archive and made available on the Wayback Machine. Out of these five websites, two (South African Department of Health and Nigeria’s NCDC) appear to be partially archived. This shows that three of five (WHO, Worldometers, and CDC) representing 60% of the websites assessed in the study are fully archived by the Internet Archive and made accessible through the Wayback Machine. This data also shows that the archived webpages are those which were currently considered as the most reliable sources of COVID-19 related statistics and information. The details of the archived websites are further broken down below.

Table 1.

Websites' presence on the Wayback Machine

6.2 Analysis of the Websites’ harvest details on the Wayback Machine

This section is a breakdown of the details of the archived websites as presented in Table 1. From the Table, all the five websites included in the study have been harvested and archived by the Internet Archive and accessible on the Wayback Machine. Table 2 shows that the crawling of the harvested webpages by the Internet Archive started between 20th January 2020 and 27th March 2020. The earliest website to be harvested is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 webpage followed by WHO and Worldometer which were first crawled on 20th, 24th and 29th January 2020 respectively. This shows that information contained on these websites as far back as January 2020 can be retrieved on the Wayback Machine. The other websites were harvested in March 2020 and harvesting on the Africa related COVID-19 webpages all started in March 2020. While the NCDC webpage was first crawled on 15th March 2020, the South African Department of Health COVID-19 portal was first crawled on 15th March 2020. The index COVID-19 cases in Africa were reported between late February and mid-March 2020, so it is obvious that these COVID-19 webpages or portals started publishing reports about the COVID-19 pandemic around this period which explains the late harvesting of the webpages by the Internet Archive in comparison to other webpages. Also, the harvest period of the COVID-19 webpages presented in Table 2 revealed that most of the webpages were harvested between the date of their first crawl and the 17th of April 2020 when the data was analyzed. Furthermore, Table 2 shows the frequency of crawl of the webpages assessed. It is important to note that the frequency of crawled data presented refers to how frequently the webpages were crawled by the Internet Archive and not the number of times the websites were updated. Some of the webpages also crawled multiple times a day. Worldometer’s COVID-19 webpage is the webpage that is harvested most frequently with 5019 crawls between 29th March 2020 and 17th April 2020. Within this period the webpage was crawled almost every day except 9th February 2020. The CDC page was crawled 2,058 times between 20th March 2020 and 17th April 2020 with multiple crawls almost every day except 22nd and 23rd January 2020. Similarly, WHO webpage crawled 1,501 times between 24th January and 17th April 2020 was crawled multiple times daily except 4th, 7th, and 10th February 2020. The South African Department of Health COVID-19 portal was also crawled multiple times daily between its harvest period for a total of 202 times except 16th March 2020.

Table 2.

Webpages harvest details on Wayback Machine

The data analyzed revealed that NCDC COVID-19 webpages were the least crawled. Data on the Wayback Machine reveals that the webpages are not harvested regularly. Between 27th March and 17th April, the page crawled only seven times within six inconsecutive harvest days. It is therefore evident through the data that some of the webpage’s crawl more frequently than others. While some crawled multiple times daily, some crawled almost daily apart from 1-2 days while others like the NCDC webpages crawled less frequently. This reveals that some of the webpages are more complete than others in the Web archive and would be most likely more useful for future research.

7. Discussion

The findings of the study revealed that web archiving is a feasible and effective technique for preserving ephemeral online data related to COVID-19 and other digital history. The analysis of the contents, such as COVID-19 data on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, showed that the extent of the capture of COVID-19 related websites at the peak of the pandemic was generally high. The ease of access and dissemination of the content was also satisfactory, with the archived digital content being easily accessible through web archives. However, it was discovered that the capture of online content on social media sites like Twitter is generally low. Although the Wayback Machine seems to have captured the URLs, the actual contents of these websites are not accessible.

The findings on archiving frequencies highlight critical implications for future research usability of the archived web. Websites with higher crawl frequencies, such as those of WHO, CDC, and Worldometer, are likely to provide more comprehensive and consistent data for longitudinal studies. On the other hand, websites with lower crawl frequencies, such as those from the NCDC and the South African Department of Health, may result in incomplete datasets, potentially limiting their usefulness for detailed research or comparative analyses. These disparities emphasize the need for targeted efforts to enhance the frequency and consistency of web crawls for underrepresented regions to ensure equitable access to archived data. In addition, the challenges associated with archiving social media content warrant deeper exploration, given the pivotal role social media played in disseminating COVID-19 information and shaping public discourse. Unlike static web pages, social media platforms feature dynamic, user-generated content that is often ephemeral and more difficult to capture comprehensively. For example, Twitter threads or Facebook posts containing critical updates, personal testimonies, or real-time discussions may disappear or become inaccessible due to privacy settings, account deletions, or platform policies. To address these challenges, web archiving initiatives must consider developing specialized tools and frameworks tailored to the unique nature of social media content. Such tools should prioritize capturing metadata, preserving multimedia elements, and maintaining context to ensure the usability of archived social media data for future research.

The study also identified some challenges associated with the web archiving of ephemeral online data, including the technical complexity of the web archiving process, the need for continuous monitoring and maintenance of the archived material, and the legal and ethical issues associated with the preservation of online data. In addition, there seems to be a lack of awareness of the potential of web archiving as a tool for preserving content online, especially in Africa. Archivists and other stakeholders involved in digital preservation lack the required knowledge and training on the use of web archiving tools and techniques to ensure the effective preservation of digital heritage.

Analysis of several digital preservation policies revealed that web archiving is not widely recognized or incorporated into the policies of several public institutions with an online presence. These findings call for an increased effort to address technical, legal, and regional challenges, ensuring that valuable data is preserved not only for historical records but also for academic and public health research. Overall, the findings of this study highlight the importance of web archiving as a valuable technique for preserving ephemeral online data related to COVID-19 and other potential digital history.

8. Conclusion

In conclusion, this study explored the use of web archiving techniques for preserving ephemeral online data related to digital history like COVID-19 and political events. The study showed that web archiving is a feasible and effective technique for preserving ephemeral data, information, and records. The study highlighted prominent sources like the World Health Organization (WHO), Worldometer, and national health departments provided critical data that were extensively archived. However, it also exposed the relatively lower frequency of archiving for websites focused on Africa, emphasizing a regional disparity in digital preservation efforts. Furthermore, technical complexities and legal and ethical considerations present significant hurdles in the archiving process, necessitating comprehensive strategies to address these issues. Additionally, the findings underscore the importance of web archiving in preserving not just public health information but also the broader socio-economic and political narratives shaped by the pandemic. This ensures that future researchers have a holistic view of the impact and response to such global crises. The study also calls attention to the potential for web archiving to support public accountability and transparency by preserving official communications and public reactions in real-time.

Based on the study’s findings, several key recommendations are proposed to strengthen web archiving for preserving digital history. Increasing awareness and providing targeted training on web archiving tools is essential to equip archivists and stakeholders with the necessary skills. Continuous monitoring and maintenance of archived content should be ensured through clear policies to support long-term preservation and accessibility. Developing robust legal and ethical frameworks, with contributions from archivists, policymakers, legal experts, and affected communities, is vital to balance preservation efforts with individual and collective rights, especially for marginalized groups. Also, greater collaboration among stakeholders and partnerships with organizations like the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) and the UK Web Archive can help address regional disparities, particularly in Africa. Governments and academic institutions should also establish regional centers to build local capacity and advocate for sustainable funding. Furthermore, a comprehensive preservation framework should be developed to guide consistent archiving practices, and specialized tools must be created to improve the archiving of social media platforms like Twitter. Finally, targeted initiatives should address regional disparities by increasing the archiving of underrepresented websites. Implementing these measures will enhance the preservation of valuable digital content for future research and historical reference.

Declaration of Interest Statement

The author declares no conflicts of interest, financial assistance or funding with regards to the publication of this article.

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