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On the 25th of May 2018 the Republic of Ireland had a referendum on the 8th Amendment, if repealed this would make way for government to implement legislation on access to abortion services.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.

This is a guest blog by Kelly Burchmore, a graduate trainee digital archivist on the Bodleian Libraries’ Developing the Next Generation Archivist programme. The Bodleian is one of the 6 legal deposit libraries in the UK. One of her projects this year is to help curate special collections in the UK Web Archive. Since May she’s been working on the Gender Equality collection.

Why are we collecting gender equality websites?
2018 is the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People’s Act. UK-wide memorials and celebrations of this journey, and victory of women’s suffrage, are all evident online: from events, exhibitions, commemorations and campaigns. Popular topics being discussed at the moment include the hashtags #timesup and #metoo, gender pay disparity and the recent referendum on the 8th Amendment in the Republic of Ireland. These discussions produce a lot of ephemeral material, and without web archiving this material is at risk of moving or even disappearing. Web Archives are able to demonstrate that gender equality is increasingly being discussed in the media and these discussions have been developing over many years.

Through UK Web Archive SHINE Interface we can see that matching text for the phrase ‘gender equality’ increased from a result of 0.002% (24 out of 843,204) of crawled resources in 1996, to 0.044% (23,289 out of 53,146,359) in 2013.

If we search UK web content relating to gender equality we will generate so many results; for example, organisations have published their gender pay discrepancy reports online and there is a lot to engage with from social media accounts of both individuals and organisations relating to campaigning for gender equality. It becomes apparent that when we browse this web content gender equality means something different for so many presences online: charities, societies, employers, authorities, heritage centres and individuals such as social entrepreneurs, teachers, researchers and more.

What we are collecting?
The Gender Equality special collection, that is now live on the UK Web Archive comprises material that provides a snapshot into attitudes towards gender equality in the UK. Web material is harvested under the areas of:

• Bodily autonomy
• Domestic abuse/Gender based violence
• Gender equality in the workplace
• Gender identity
• Parenting
• The gender pay gap
• Women’s suffrage

100 years on from the introduction of limited women’s suffrage, the fight for gender equality continues. The collection is still undergoing curation and growing in archival records - and you can help too!

How to get involved?
If there are any UK websites that you think should be added to the Gender Equality collection then you can take up the UK Web Archive’s call for action and nominate.

By Emily Mahoney

Upon hearing that I had a work experience placement in the British Library, I immediately thought of books and reading, a main passion of mine from a young age. When I found out about the many other sides to working in such an immense organisation, (the British Library employs just over 1,500 people) I realised it would be far more fascinating than I had imagined.

I was assigned a position in Web Archiving with Helena Byrne for the week. Coming into a week of work experience in Web Archiving seemed overwhelming to me as someone with no previous experience in the topic, however, the team working in the department made me feel reassured immediately. Instead of being nervous, I could then focus on the multitude of interesting new information coming my way.

My first task was to identify images for the covers of the newer Special Collections on the UK Web Archive website. I was then informed that I would be working on a project with Leila Nassereldein, a PhD placement student focused on archiving a collection of online zines that are independent, self-published, and authored by Asian, African or Caribbean people in the UK. This was extremely exciting to me as this is an area most people don’t necessarily think of when considering the British Library and Leila was keen on making a space for these zines through which the smaller, independent and sometimes radical publications could also leave their mark in our web history. While working on this project with Leila I learnt to appraise, curate and archive contemporary websites using the Annotation Curation Tool (W3 ACT) tool.

Before this week I had never come across the UK Web Archive and this experience has made me aware of just how important it is that we have access to this information in years to come. The online public archive is also an area with a large number of research points that I will definitely be using during any further study. When writing this I was asked what the ‘most interesting’ part of my placement was, however, it would be too hard to choose due to the amount of things that I have learnt during this week that I had never encountered before. Overall, my experience at the British Library was an enriching one that I will never forget, and helped me consider an aspect of our online life that had never occurred to me before.