By Tom J. Smyth
As we mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games, LAC is proud to launch a web archival collection documenting this important event in Canada’s history.
Image from the web archive homepage of the Vancouver Olympics.
What is web archiving and why do we do it?
“Web archiving” is a specialized digital curation and preservation-based discipline that guarantees future access to unique resources from the Internet. It uses specialized hardware and software to target, download, arrange, describe, preserve and replay the original published and interactive context of web resources via emulation in a specialized public discovery and access portal.
Web archiving is practised by national libraries and archives all over the world to capture and preserve web resources that are usually unique and expressed in no other medium. Preserving our digital documentary heritage from our national Internet domain is, therefore, of vital importance to the nation’s history.
Acquiring web resources became a formal part of LAC’s mandate in 2004 under the Library and Archives of Canada Act, subsection 8(2). LAC’s means of realizing this part of its mandate is the Web and Social Media Preservation Program (WSMPP) within the Digital Services Sector, which has operated as a daily activity since mid-2005.
The program curates data and research collections of unique web resources documenting Canadian historical and cultural themes and events. Curating these collections aligns with LAC’s priorities and policy frameworks, requirements of computational use (e.g. in textual and data mining, AI, Machine Learning [ML], and Large Language Models [LLMs]) and modern digital humanities scholarship. We then make these resources publicly available for generations to come and to support future international research on Canada via the Government of Canada Web Archive (GCWA).
The discipline is advanced by the 50-plus members of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, of which LAC is a founding member and currently holds a Steering Committee chair.
Web archival collections curation for the Olympics
From the inception of the Web and Social Media Preservation Program, LAC has collected resources on the Olympic games as they were running, beginning with the Torino 2006 Winter Games (Turin, Italy).
In the beginning, our effort was modest and consisted of collecting the official Olympic site and the Canadian Olympic Committee site. We then progressed into collecting information on federal support programs (“Own the Podium”), individual Olympic sport organizations and the athlete blogs.
LAC’s extensive holdings in web archival Olympic and Paralympic collections now includes:
- 2006 Winter, Turin, February 10–26, 2006
- 2008 Summer, Beijing, August 8–24, 2008
- 2010 Winter, Vancouver, February 12–28, 2010
- 2012 Summer, London, July 27–August 12, 2012
- 2014 Winter Games, Sochi, February 7–23, 2014
- 2016 Summer, Rio de Janeiro, August 5–21, 2016
- 2018 Winter, Pyeongchang, February 9–25, 2018
- 2020 Summer, Tokyo, July 23–August 8, 2020
- 2022 Winter, Beijing, February 4–20, 2022
- 2024 Summer, Paris, July 26–August 11, 2024
Canada has hosted the Olympic Games on three occasions: the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal, the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, and most recently, the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver.
The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games ran February 12–28, 2010 (1). Canada sent some 209 athletes to the Olympic games, our fourth-greatest contribution historically, where they placed third in the overall medal standings with 14 gold, 7 silver, and 5 bronze (Canada however placed first in terms of total gold medals) (2).
Team Canada celebrates after winning the women’s hockey gold medal game at the Vancouver Olympics in February 2010. Credit: Jason Ransom. (MIKAN 5570828)
The 2010 Games were special for Canada and involved “unprecedented partnerships” with some Indigenous communities (which does not speak for or reflect the opinion of all Indigenous groups). It was also the last and greatest Canadian Olympic hosting effort and marked an important milestone for the Web and Social Media Preservation Program in the development of the program and thematic collection and curation methodologies.
Evolving collection development and web archival digital curation
Beginning with Vancouver 2010, we have continuously elaborated our methodologies and curated extensive web archival collections documenting Canada’s performance and perspectives, as well as the experiences of Canadian Olympians at the Winter, Summer and Paralympic Games.
Curation for Vancouver 2010 began in June 2009. At that time, we were approached by an academic researcher who was interested in web archiving, particularly in the promotion of tourism and related sports activities. How was tourism in British Columbia being promoted while it hosted the games?
We had to admit that our answer to the question of tourism in British Columbia was… “no idea!” Starting the curation process early, however, gave us plenty of lead time to collect news media and web resources documenting preparations and developments leading up to the formal games. It also allowed us to consider new and uniquely Canadian perspectives in our curation, such as Indigenous viewpoints.
Data and web resources on “tourism” as a parallel topic to the Olympic and Paralympic Games wasn’t something we deliberately targeted and collected previously (again, we hadn’t hosted a Games event since Calgary 1988). This begged the question: what other resources or themes would researchers be looking for in our web archive that we hadn’t anticipated?
This question began something of a renaissance in our curation thinking and our alignment with broader principles of national legal deposit. Since client research needs can never be fully anticipated, it is important that we collect resources as broadly as possible. To take it a step further: how could we curate and arrange our data in such a way that it would support future computational and digital humanities research use of web archival collections as “big data”?
We then began considering new themes and sub-themes for curation, such as infrastructural and venue development, environmental and “green” impact, economic impact of hosting the Games and even anti-Olympic sentiment. Expanding our focus in this way required additional research but resulted in a much richer and more comprehensive web archive for future generations.
This effort paid off. Before the end of 2009, the work came to the attention of our host organization. The Federal Secretariat for the Olympic and Paralympic Games at Heritage Canada learned of our project and expressed interest in promoting the work. The project was then showcased in the 2009-10 Government of Canada Performance Report (3) as part of LAC’s and the Secretariat’s deliverables for the Vancouver 2010 Games.
Our current collections methodology has matured to the point where many topics, such as the Olympics (also the federal government domain presence, change of government or cabinet, the federal elections and so on), now have a refined “core seedlist.” A core seedlist is a set of web URLs that are unlikely to change and that can be quickly, efficiently and frequently collected as the key resources for those topics. This frees web archiving specialists to concentrate on curating and including extra resources that are generated as a direct result of, and are attuned more specifically to, unique events. A pertinent example is the Paris 2024 games.
Paris 2024 and announcing public access for the Vancouver 2010 collection
For the Paris 2024 games, there would clearly be some new issues and topics that perhaps weren’t as relevant or that didn’t exist in 2010. For example, eSports first became a serious consideration for the formal Olympics, and we also witnessed the introduction of “breaking” as an Olympic sport. Security was also a major concern, which was curated as a major topic for the first time.
While our initial intention was to publish the Paris 2024 collection to kick off our Olympics curation, we discovered that most extensive work on this had already been done while preparing the web archival metadata and controlled vocabularies for the Vancouver 2010 collection. It should therefore be the Vancouver collection that kicked off our publishing on Olympics, as it could serve as the most complex and “template” model for arranging our historical Olympics collections via the Government of Canada Web Archive.
Wouldn’t it be grand(er), if we could lead our Olympics collections with the publication of one dear to our hearts, which was pivotal to the development of the program?
On that note, we are pleased to launch our Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic collection—within days of the fifteenth anniversary of the Games!
To facilitate browsing and discovery, the collection has been arranged into sub-topics including the following:
- Blogs
- Own the Podium
- Sponsors
- Tourism
- Government – municipal
- Government – provincial
- Government – federal
- Environment
- Indigenous perspectives
- Sports organizations
- Non-profit organizations
- Education
- Canada Post
- Official Olympics websites
- Community
- News media
- Alternative perspectives and protests
- Venues
- Athletes
- Paralympics
- Corporate
- Commemoration
- Looking back
In establishing these topics and facets, controlled vocabularies and metadata architecture necessary to support, arrange and publish the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic collection, we have set the groundwork on which to build, expand, augment, and publish all our other historical Olympics collections, which can now follow in due course.
We hope you enjoy the Vancouver 2010 collection!
References
- Vancouver 2010 – Team Canada – Official Olympic Team Website
- Team Canada’s Team Size by Olympic Winter Games – Team Canada – Official Olympic Team Website
- Report of the President of the Treasury Board of Canada. Canada’s Performance: The Government of Canada’s Contribution. Annual Report to Parliament 2009-10, pp. 77.
Tom J. Smyth is the Manager of the Web and Social Media Preservation Program (WSMPP) and the Government of Canada Web Archive (GCWA) at Library and Archives Canada. The WSMPP team includes Elizabeth Doyle, Jason Meng, Kevin Palendat and Russell White.
Library and Archives Canada Blog 