Webarchiv Central Asia

Cataloguing Central Asian and Sinkiang Websites

Many websites from Central Asia and especially from Sinkiang (Xinjiang) come and go with a short life span.

The Special Information Service cooperates with the Centre of Research Libraries (CRL) in the USA.
While cataloguing Central Asian websites we check if the site has been archived in the Internet Archive and is available via the Wayback Machine. If certain URLs are not found in the Wayback Machine we put them on a list and send this list to the CRL. The CRL checks the list and if appropriate asks the Archive-It service to crawl specified websites once a week. These crawls are saved in the collection Central Asian Web Archive (former name Central Asian Web Archiving). This special collection is open to the public. At the moment mainly Uighur, Kazakh, Oirat-Mongolian sites from Sinkiang are found in this collection. Further websites from Central Asia will be added in future.

Websites mainly in Uighur language are catalogued in the German Union Catalogue of Serials (ZDB), as websites are classified as serial publications. The catalogue of the ZDB is part of the Common Library Network (GBV) and the Library Network Southwest Germany (SWB) available in English and German.

How to Search the Webarchive?

On the homepage of the German Union Catalogue  use the long search slot and insert „aiw website ssg Zentralasien“. This will give you all websites catalogued for the Special Information Service Central Asia. This specific search may be narrowed down by adding keywords like “islam” or “religion”. The code for searchkey is thm (“Thema”). The quotation marks have to be deleted first for the search: aiw website ssg Zentralasien thm islam. The search keys are in German but the data in the background may include an English equivalent (or not). Other key words available in English would be sale, medical, company, Uyghurs, Koran, culture etc. Many searchkeys may be used in one search, like: aiw website ssg Zentralasien thm culture Uyghurs religion. For reasons unknown in some cases only the German keyword works, like: Exil (eng. exile). English and German keywords may be used in the same search, like: aiw website ssg Zentralasien thm Exil Uyghurs.

The search may be extended by searching for websites in certain languages. The searchkey for language is spr. Thus spr uig for Uigur, spr kaz for Kazakh, spr kir for Kyrgyz, spr mon for Mongolian and Sinkiang Oirat. Thus: aiw website spr uig will show you all websites in Uigur language.

If you are looking for Weblogs (blogs) in Uigur please use: aiw weblog spr uig. Instead of uig you may use other language codes like kaz, kir, mon etc.

If you are looking for Uigur Newspapers in the webarchive please use: aiw zeitung spr uig. Again instead of uig you may use kaz, kir, mon etc.

The catalogue data usually contain a link to the URL of the original website and a link to website as archived in the wayback machine. The catalogue data may at first look restricted to one URL. Please click on the plus symbol (+) (“Further information”) left of the first URL to see more URLs. The same applies to the summary, which is usually available in German and English. The full summary again can be accessed by clicking on the + sign. There may be many + signs on the left margin.

Download PDF  regarding Webarchive and search explanations.