Accession 22-030

Smithsonian Institution

Website Records, 2020

Descriptive Entry

This accession consists of the Earth Optimism Summit website as it existed on April 22, 28, and 30, 2020, as well as the tweets containing the hashtag #EarthOptimism between April 1 and May 20, 2020. These dates correspond with the Summit organized by the Smithsonian Conservation Commons which was held April 22-26, 2020. The Earth Optimism Summit is an annual gathering of a diverse group of conservation-minded professionals and citizens to discuss and share solutions about how to preserve biodiversity, protect natural resources, and address climate change. Already planned for similar dates in April as an in-person event at the Smithsonian Institution, the Summit was quickly transformed into a digital format due to the Covid-19 pandemic beginning in mid-March.

The website served as one of several streaming platforms for live video content which was then saved to the website for future viewing. The website also provides information about the current and past Summits as well as associated events around the world. On April 22 and 30, the website was captured using an automated crawler and on April 28, it was captured using manual crawling software. Due to technical issues, some videos are missing from this accession or do not load properly.

The Conservation Commons used the hashtag #EarthOptimism on the microblog Twitter to promote the Summit and also encouraged its use in association with posts, known as "tweets," related to the Summit and the issues it addressed. Tweets using this hashtag included staff, speakers, attendees, scientists, students, and the general public. The search results on this hashtag within Twitter were crawled twice on April 1, 2020, once using an automated crawler and once using a manual crawler. In addition, all tweets containing the hashtag that were dated between April 14 and May 20, 2020, were exported from Twitter in two formats.

Materials are in electronic format.

Top of Page

Index Terms

This collection is indexed under the following access terms. These are links to collections with related topics, persons or places.

Name

• Earth Optimism Summit (2020: Washington, DC)
• Smithsonian Conservation Commons
• Twitter

Subject

• Biodiversity conservation
• Climatic changes
• Conservation of natural resources
• Microblogs
• Museums -- Public relations
• Online social networks
• Social media
• Special events
• Web sites

Physical Characteristics of Materials in the Collection

• Electronic records
• Web sites

Top of Page

Administrative Information

Preferred Citation

Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 22-030, Smithsonian Institution, Website Records

Top of Page