Internet Archive's new COVID-19 Web Archive lets you explore the pandemic from different perspectives

There are moments in everyone’s lives when they become aware that they are living through history. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its global lockdowns, was definitely one of those times.

In a bid to document the "personal, cultural, and societal impact" of the global pandemic from a number of different perspectives, the Internet Archive has created a giant COVID-19 web portal for anyone to explore.

Announcing the new project, Internet Archive's Lori Donovan explains:

The COVID-19 Web Archive builds on this curatorial work to gather together more than 160 web archive collections created by more than 125 libraries, archives, and cultural heritage organizations into a shared access portal built and maintained by the Internet Archive. The COVID-19 Web Archive currently totals nearly 90 terabytes of archived data composed of over 1.5 billion webpages and allows for full text, metadata, and media search within individual collections and across the entire archive.

Collections in the COVID-19 Web Archive include:

• Athens Regional Library System’s Athens, Georgia Area COVID-19 Response collection, which highlights "the local response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in Athens, Georgia. Included are communications from Athens-Clarke County government, communications from Clarke County School District, fundraisers for local businesses, 'Band Together' showcases, and various other items that are related to the local response."
• University of British Columbia’s COVID-19, Racism, and Asian Communities collection, which documents incidents of racism against the Asian communities in Canada, related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
• New York University’s Tamiment Wagner: NYC COVID-19 Web Activism collection, which "documents activists’ use of social media and the internet to create content, online campaigns, online actions, virtual mutual aid networks and funds to highlight, resist, and call attention to ways in which COVID-19 has impacted New York City physically, emotionally, politically, and economically."
• Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s COVID-19 Collection, "focus[ed] on the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s programmatic COVID-19 response via #GrowTogetherPHS, a campaign to engage our audiences in gardening at home."

The COVID-19 Web Archive will be continuously updated over time, and you can access and explore it here.