By Andy Jackson, Web Archive Technical Lead, British Library

In 2020, we led a project funded by the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) called Asking questions with web archives – introductory notebooks for historians, developing a set of Jupyter notebooks to introduce researchers to the potential and possibilities of web archives. In collaboration with the National Library of Australia and National Library of New Zealand, this funding enabled Tim Sherratt to create the Web Archives section of the GLAM Workbench.

We were very happy with how this project worked out, and we think collaborating with someone like Tim opens up new ways of supporting researchers working with web archives. If you’d like to know more about the results of the project, check out Tim’s 2020 blog post and his conference presentation from 2021.

While the investment in project funding got the ball rolling, the GLAM Workbench needs ongoing management and maintenance to keep it running.  This should not be taken for granted, so we’re proud to announce that the Web Archives section of the GLAM Workbench is now supported by the British Library.

We hope this will help ensure this critical resource remains available in the future, and we would like to encourage other web archives to look at whether they could pursue project or supporting funding to help maintain and grow the GLAM Workbench.