Documenting the Olympics & Paralympics
Join our panel discussion to discover more about researchers' experiences when navigating archives, as well as the collection policies related to Olympics/Paralympics of GLAM organisations. This event is a collaboration between the British Society of Sports History (BSSH) and the British Library Web Archive team.
Register here to receive the joining details:
https://forms.gle/Tjzikxgjvr3FofSr8
Date: 19 June 2020
Time: 3-4:30pm (BST) / 10-11:30am (EST)
Location: Zoom
Twitter hashtag: #ResearchingtheGames
Presentations
Heather Dichter, De Montfort University - Finding Olympic history in non-sport archives
Laura Alexandra Brown, Northumbria University - The heritage of the Games: Interpreting urban change in Olympic host cities
Robert McNicol, Librarian, Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum - Researching the Olympics/Paralympics at Wimbledon
Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives, British Library - Preserving the Olympics/Paralympics online
What to expect
There is a broad mix of physical, digitised and born digital resources will be covered in the presentations. The Curator of Web Archives, Helena Byrne will be discussing the UK Web Archive collections related to the Olympics/Paralympics as well as the collaboration with the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC).
The year 2020 was originally an Olympic/Paralympic year before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. It is also a significant milestone for the UK Web Archive and the IIPC. It marks 15 years since the first UK Web Archive collections were published and also 10 years since the IIPC first started archiving the Olympics.
The UK Web Archive and sports
The UK Web Archive has been archiving sports related websites since it was established in 2005. However, it wasn’t until 2017 when dedicated sports collections were established. There are three broad collection groups Sports Collection, Sports: Football and Sports: International Events. The subsections of the Sports: International Events includes two summer and two winter Olympic/Paralympic collections from 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. The largest of these collections is the Olympic & Paralympic Games 2012 collection as the Games were hosted in the UK.
Access and reuse
Under the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations 2013 (NPLD) 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 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.
IIPC and the Olympic/Paralympics
The UK Web Archive is made up of the six UK legal deposit libraries, two of those libraries, the British Library and the National Library of Scotland are also members of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) which was founded in 2003. In 2010 the IIPC started its first collaborative collection on the Winter Olympics 2010 and has covered every Olympic/Paralympic Games since. Since the formation of the IIPC Content Development Group (CDG) the collections have started to include a broader range of subjects on and off the playing field.
Get Involved
The UK Web Archive aims to archive, preserve and give access to the 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.