By Philip Eagle, Subject Librarian - Science, Technology and Medicine at The British Library

 

 

A Philosopher Shewing an Experiment on the Air Pump, 1769 by Valentine Green

 

Introduction

We have just activated our new web archive collection on science in the UK. One of the British Library's objectives as an institution as a whole is to increase our profile and level of service to the science community. In pursuit of this aim we are curating a web archive collection in collaboration with the UK legal deposit libraries. We have some collections already on science related subjects such as the late Stephen Hawking and science at Cambridge University, but not science as a whole.

 

Collection scope

We have interpreted "science" widely to include engineering and communications, but not IT, as that already has a collection. Our collection is arranged according to the standard disciplines such as biology, chemistry, engineering, earth sciences and physics, and then subdivided according to their common divisions, based on the treatment of science in the Universal Decimal Classification.

The collection has a wide range of types of site. We have tried to be fairly exhaustive on active UK science-related blogs, learned societies, charities, pressure groups, and museums. Because of the sheer number of university departments in the UK, we have not been able to cover them all. Instead we have selected the departments that did best in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, and then taken a random sample to make sure that our collection properly reflects the whole world of academic science in the UK. We are also adding science-related Twitter accounts. Social media is generally difficult to archive due to its proprietary nature, but Twitter is open source so we can archive this more easily.

 

Access

Under the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations 2013 we can archive UK websites but we are only able to make them available to people outside the Legal Deposit Libraries Reading Rooms, if the website owner has given permission. Some of the sites in the collection have already had permission granted, such as the Hunterian Society, Dame Athene Donald’s blog, and the Royal College of Anaesthetists. Some others who have not given permission include Science Sparks, the Wellcome Collection, and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. The Web Archive page will tell you whether any archived site is only viewable from a library, anything with no statement can be viewed on the public web.

Get involved

As ever, if you have a site to nominate that has been left out, you can tell us by filling in our public nomination form: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/info/nominate

By Jason Webber, Web Archiving Engagement Manager

 

We at the UK Web Archive (UKWA) have recently taken part in a new initiative called WARCnet led by the University of Aarhus in Denmark (and funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark).

“The aim of the WARCnet network is to promote high-quality national and transnational research that will help us to understand the history of (trans)national web domains and of transnational events on the web, drawing on the increasingly important digital cultural heritage held in national web archives.”

 

WARCnet logo

 

The majority of participants are researchers currently using web archives as part of their studies, many with extensive experience and others new to the field. This makes this an exciting project to be part of as it is an excellent way for content holders such as UKWA to be able to work closely with a group of researchers and try and understand their needs and challenges. The project had a kick-off meeting in May 2020 that was originally intended to be in person but took place virtually. All the speakers pre-recorded their talks which does now mean that these are now all available (including one by myself). I’d particularly recommend viewing the two keynote speakers Matthew S. Weber and Ian Milligan.

 

Title slide for Jason Webber's WARCnet presentation

 

Working Groups
It is intended for any outcomes from WARCnet to be driven by the participants themselves and to this end four working groups have been formed:

 

• Working Group 1 - Comparing entire web domains
• Working Group 2 - Analysing transnational events
• Working group 3 - Digital research methods and tools
• Working group 4 - Research data management across borders

 

The UKWA team is involved with each of the first three working groups, all of which have met in the last weeks to see how we can take this project forward. You can read more about each group here.

There are at least three more small conferences planned (currently as in person), one later this year in Luxembourg and two next year in London and Aarhus.

Look out for updates on our involvement with this initiative on this blog and through our twitter account @UKWebArchive and @WARC_net.

 

 

Stamps issued by Greece in 1896, the Universal Postal Union Collection, Philatelic Collections, The British Library.

 

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.

 

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection

 

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.