This blog post follows on from Kelly Burchmore’s post - Building collections on Gender Equality at the UK Web Archive, if you’ve not done so, we would encourage you to read it first.

Background
The UK Web Archive (UKWA) aims to collect online material connected with nationally important issues and debates. Recently this has included the long running discussions around bodily autonomy. Much of this material is via social media, that can be very challenging to collect.

See the trend online.

Why is UKWA #Archivingthe8th?¹
Although the UK Web Archive only collects material related to the UK, many individuals and groups connected with the referendum on the 8th amendment¹ campaigned in the UK, therefore much of the material falls within our remit.

In Britain there are many sections of the Irish based Abortion Rights Campaign group set up in various cities starting with the London Irish Abortion Rights Campaign, in the lead up to the referendum date they ran a home to vote campaign through the website hometovote.com. The pro-life group London Irish United For Life also ran a similar campaign through the website hometovote.uk. All of these websites and many more websites on any subject related to this subject are archived in the Bodily Autonomy subsection of the Gender Equality collection.

The UK Web Archive only archives content published in the UK, but other web archives also collected content on this subject. The National Library of Ireland built a special collection on the referendum and George Washington University archived over 2 million tweets that used popular hashtags related to the referendum.

How to get involved?
If there are any UK websites or Twitter accounts that you think should be added to the Bodily Autonomy subsection of the Gender Equality collection, then you can take up the UK Web Archive’s call for action and nominate content by following this link:

beta.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/info/nominate

By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives, The British Library

¹#Archivingthe8th
On the 25th of May 2018 the Republic of Ireland had a referendum on the 8th Amendment, if repealed this would make way for government to implement legislation on access to abortion services. Although, the referendum on the 8th Amendment only impacted on the laws of the Republic of Ireland its significance spread across the world and it received a lot of international media attention. Both pro-choice and pro-life solidarity campaign groups formed around the world, mostly made up of the Irish diaspora and other campaigners passionate about the subject. After the result was announced the hashtag #archivingthe8th started trending on Twitter as people wanted to know how this part of public history was going to be preserved for future generations.