Data for All for Good – Archiving Reproductive Health

By Clare Lanigan and Dr Lorraine Grimes.

World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) is held on the first Thursday of every November and is a chance to celebrate the positive impact that digital preservation has on the world. This blog post analyses the value to the public good of archiving digital material related to social movements, using the Archiving Reproductive Health (ARH) project at the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) as a case study.

About Archiving Reproductive Health

The ‘Digital Preservation of Reproductive Health Resources: Archiving the 8th‘ (Archiving Reproductive Health) project aims to provide long-term preservation and access to at-risk born-digital content generated by grassroots women’s reproductive health movements before and during the campaign to repeal the 8th Amendment of the Irish Constitution. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the project is publishing and making available both digital collections and research protocols on the Digital Repository of Ireland. The preservation and publication of these collections add significantly to our understanding of women’s rights movements and the history of reproductive healthcare in Ireland.

Context: The Eighth Amendment

Many countries around the world have seen mobilisations of people for progressive change in recent years, and Ireland is no exception. In 2018, the Irish public voted in a referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution. The Eighth Amendment, enacted by another referendum in 1983, placed a constitutional ban on the right to abortion care in Ireland (although, from 1992, women in Ireland legally travelled to Britain and other places to access abortion care).

The repeal of the Eighth Amendment meant that the Irish government was able to pass legislation enabling elective abortion in Ireland for the first time in the nation’s history.

Digital Content

A great deal of digital content was generated over the course of the referendum campaign (and pro-choice activism in the decades before), but its long-term stability is as tenuous as all web content. Websites and social media platforms containing links or copies of images, graphics, and documents are vulnerable due to hosting costs, web or social media platforms going out of business, and proprietary software paywalls. Gathering and preserving this material in open-source format on a trusted digital repository such as DRI is essential to ensuring access into the future.

In March and May 2022, ARH published collections of design and publicity material from activist groups, as well as a sequence of stories from the popular Facebook page ‘In Her Shoes: Women of the Eighth’, with more to follow. ‘In Her Shoes’ is a page where people anonymously shared their experiences of being unable to access abortion in Ireland. 

Research data collections in the form of oral history interviews with medics, campaigners, and women’s rights activists were also published. These provide important records of the lived experiences of activists and people affected by issues of reproductive inequality in Ireland.

Audiences

The creators of these materials are in most cases volunteers and members of the public themselves, rather than academics. Preserving and making available these collections allows contributors secure, long-term access to their own and their organisation’s content. Oral history interviews and the In Her Shoes stories are valuable resources for future researchers, particularly in the social sciences. Making the administrative records of activist organisations into searchable, citable resources helps to ensure that future research and writing on the history of reproductive justice in Ireland is comprehensive and representative.

In 2023, our efforts will be centred around a Public Collection Day, allowing organisations involved in the project to share their work with the wider public, while also allowing members of the public to contribute in the form of oral histories and personal ephemera, to be digitised on the day.

Preservation and Sustainability

ARH is a unique project providing long-term access to valuable at-risk social history data. Preservation in DRI ensures the data’s accessibility in the long-term. The DRI is a publicly funded, CoreTrustSeal awarded repository. The repository and its tools are built using freely available, open source software and our specifications are freely available online. All repository collections and publications are free to access and openly available, with the exception of certain social science datasets where access is restricted to researchers due to privacy concerns. All datasets are issued with Data Cite DOIs. Metadata is universally published with a CC-BY licence.

Find out more about the ARH project and explore the collections from the project page.