By Helena Byrne, Web Archive Curator, The British Library

The 30th September is National Sporting Heritage Day in the UK and to celebrate the event in 2018 we will give you a quick overview of our sports collections. 

Introduction
Sport studies give us a real insight into popular culture and political issues of the time, however, it is a subject area that has often been underrepresented in many traditional libraries and archives. The UK Web Archive works across the six UK legal Deposit Libraries and with other external partners to try and bridge gaps in our subject expertise.

UKWA Sports Collections
We currently have three collections that focus on sport:

1. Sport: Football
2. Sports Collection
3. Sports: International Events

Trend graph on SHINE

Sport: Football
Football in all its varieties is probably the most popular sport in the UK, which is why there is a collection dedicated exclusively to football and related activities. There are many subsections to the Rugby and Soccer strand of the collection which can be viewed by clicking on the information box.

Sports Collection
The general collection on sports has been broken down into subsections based on the type of sport rather than a specific sport title like tennis or snooker. These subject headings were based on the Universal Decimal Classification page about sport (from PD 1000 – 2003 UDC Abridged Edition). We used this general taxonomy of sports so that the collection can easily adapt to new sporting trends that emerge in the future. The Ball Sports section excludes football as there is already a dedicated collection on this subject. Ball sports is probably the most versatile section and this has an additional five subsections:

1. By Hand
2. On a Table
3. With Club
4. With Racket (Racquet)
5. With a Stick

Sports: International Events
Our third main collection covers international sporting events. Currently there are six subsections in this collection:

1. Olympic & Paralympic Games 2012
2. Commonwealth Games Glasgow 2014
3. Tour De France (Yorkshire)
4. Winter Olympics Sochi 2014
5. Rugby World Cup 2015
6. Rio Olympics 2016

The decision to build collections on international sporting events is dependent on staff resource and their subject knowledge of these events. Going forward we would like to build collections around the major sporting events hosted in the UK but this is not always easy or possible. A major challenge around collecting on international events is that many of the web publishers are not based in the UK and do not always set up a UK website for the event. We archive content under the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations 2013, that means we are not able to automatically scope in content published outside the UK.

Access and Reuse
Under the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations 2013 access to archived content is restricted to a UK Legal Deposit library reading room. However, if we have permission from the website owner we can make the archived version of their content open access along with government publications under the Open Government Licence. This is why if you browse through the collections on the Beta version of our website most of the links to archived content will direct you to one of the UK Legal Deposit Libraries for access but some of the content you can view from your personal device.

The UK Web Archive can be used just like many other primary resources whether it be a magazine or a newsletter and the same copyright regulations apply. The web has been in use for nearly 30 years and the publication The Web as History gives an outline of how researchers from different disciplines interact with web and web archive content. Some of the datasets used in this publication are available for reuse from: data.webarchive.org.uk/opendata/

International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC)
As individual institutions the British Library and the National Library of Scotland are members of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) and worked on building collaborative collections covering international events such as the Summer and Winter Olympic/Paralympic Games. Since the formation of the IIPC Content Development Group (CDG) in 2015, there has been a consolidated effort to build collections both, on and off the playing field. The British Library took the lead curatorial role in the 2016 Summer Olympics and Paralympics Games and the 2018 Winter Olympics and Paralympics Games, all of the IIPC collections are open access.

Get Involved
The UK Web Archive aims to archive, preserve and give access to the entire UK web space. 

If you see content that that should be included in one of sports collections then please fill in our online nomination form.
Alternatively, if you would like to get more hands on with curating a collection then get in touch.