By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives

Datasheets for Web Archives Toolkit

Since autumn 2022, Emily Maemura from the University of Illinois and Helena Byrne from the UK Web Archive team at the British Library have been exploring how the Datasheets for Datasets framework, devised for machine learning by Gebru et. al, could be applied to web archives. In order to explore the research question “can we use datasheets to describe the provenance of web archives, supporting research uses?” a series of workshops were organised in 2023. 

These workshops included a card sorting exercise with expertise in web archives as well as general information management. After the card sorting exercise there was a general discussion about using this framework to describe web archive collections.

These workshops formed the core of the guidance documentation published in the Datasheets for Web Archives Toolkit published in the British Library Research Repository.

The Toolkit

This Toolkit provides information on the creation of datasheets for web archives datasets. The datasheet concept is based on past work from Gebru et al. at Microsoft Research. The datasheet template and samples here were developed through a series of workshops with web archives curators, information professionals, and researchers during Spring and Summer 2023. The toolkit is composed of several parts including templates, examples, and guidance documents. Documents in the toolkit are available at a single DOI (https://doi.org/10.22020/rq8z-r112) and include:

1. Toolkit Overview 
2. Datasheets Question Guide
3. Datasheet Blank Template

Implementation 

The UK Web Archive has implemented this framework to publish data sets from its curation software the W3 Annotation Curation Tool (ACT). These data sets are available to view in the UK Web Archive: Data folder in the British Library Research Repository. So far there are just a few collections published but this will grow over the coming months.