By Jason Webber, Web Archive Engagement Manager, British Library

To celebrate both International Museums Day and the re-opening of many of the museums themselves (following a period of lockdown in the UK), this post aims to show just some of the cultural organisation websites that we have in the web archive.

National Museums
The UK has some of the most famous museums in the world, few more so than the Victoria and Albert Museum. The UK Web Archive has been collecting the V&A website since 2008. See how the website itself has changed and remind yourself of the many wonderful exhibitions that have been shown in that time.

Our colleagues at the UK Government Web Archive, based at the National Archives, keep copies of the National Museums' websites. See the Natural History Museum website from 2004. I actually worked on the web team at the NHM at this time and added many of the elements on view here.

Museums
The UK is rich with many hundreds of fantastic museums covering every aspect of life and history. From Witchcraft to lawnmowers and even pencils. Here are some other examples that we are able to publicly display:

The Cinema Museum (copy from 2010) is devoted to keeping alive the spirit of cinema from the days before the multiplex.

The Hunterian Museum (copy from 2013), part of the University of Glasgow, and founded in 1807 it is Scotland's oldest public museum and home to one of the largest collections outside the National Museums. 

Local Authorities do amazing work supporting the local museums across the UK. Here is one example, Wrexham Museum (copy from 2013) in Wales.

Who archives the archives and collects the collectors?
We aim to archive the websites of all UK museums, whatever the size. If you know of a UK Museum website that we should add, contact us here: www.webarchive.org.uk/nominate