UK Web Archive blog

The Importance of Citizen Science in Monitoring and Adapting to Climatic Change

By Andrea Deri, Cataloguer and UKWA Climate Change Collection’s lead curator

On 1 January 2023, I had my usual walk from Folkestone Gardens via Sue Godfrey Nature Park, Deptford, London Borough of Lewisham to Greenwich Park, Royal Borough of Greenwich. Overcast, temperature in single digit, humid but calm. Trees and shrubs mostly leafless: an accentuating background to patches of bright green mosses.

I was hoping to see some flowers on winter blossoming plants, for example the bell-shaped flowers of clematis ‘Jingle Bell’ in St Alfege Church’s yard, and the spidery flowers of witch hazels in the Royal Observatory Garden in Greenwich. I was also curious what other flowers I would find, earlier than usual, triggered by the warming climate. Having joined a month ago (1 December 2022) the annual wildflower ‘hunt’ on the first day of the winter, a survey of species in flower in my locality, Deptford’s urban area since 2009 organised by the Creekside Education Trust and the London Natural History Society, I expected several early bloomers. Here is Creekside’s blog post of the 2021 wildflower survey. 

While the witch hazels (Fig. 1.) did not disappoint, I was up for a surprise with clematis “Jingle Bell”: only the silky fluffy seedheads were left: it finished flowering earlier this year. I was lucky to see its last flowers on Christmas Eve 2022 (Fig. 2.). Other early flowers greeted me on a hazelnut shrub in Sue Godfrey Nature Park (Fig. 3.). But, I was truly astonished to see daffodils fully opened in a park by Creekside, just across the Creekside Discovery Centre (Fig.4.) 

Figure 1 Witch hazel (Hamamelis sp.) in flower. Photo: Andrea Deri, Royal Observatory Garden, Greenwich, London, 1 January 2023

I started searching for phenology calendars, almanacs, and any information on the blooming time of these species in my local and other areas in order to compare my observations with the “expected” (based on previous years) flowering periods. The online findings supported my assumption: I did observe earlier than expected flowerings, with the most specific data for the hazelnut.

Clematis ‘Jingle Bell’ 
According to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) clematis “Jingle Bell” flowers in winter and early spring. Compared to this broad-brush period, my observation this year suggests this individual specimen finished flowering much earlier than expected and earlier than I had observed this specimen in previous years. 

Figure 2 Clematis cirrhosa “Jingle Bells” one bell-shaped flower and fluffy seedheads. Photo: Andrea Deri, St Elfege Church, Greenwich, London, 24 December 2022

Daffodil 
A post on the Daffodil Society prompted me to do a search on RHS’s website for daffodils where February-March was quoted as the usual flowering period. More precise than for the clematis. Early flowering daffodil horticultural varieties, however, can bloom as early as January, stated one of the Gardeners World blogposts. I may have encountered an early flowering daffodil garden variety. In addition to its literary associations, this iconic flower may have just now become also a conversation starter about the climate crisis. Would its freshness and brightness frame a difficult dialogue in hope? 

Figure 3 Daffodils (Narcissus sp.) in flower. Photo: Andrea Deri, near Creekside Discovery Centre, Deptford, London, 1 January 2023

Hazelnut 
The Woodland Trust Nature’s Calendar offered me with the tool I had been really looking for: a peer-reviewed database linked to a live map that allowed me to compare my observation with fellow observers in the UK at day level precision.  

Figure 4 Hazelnut (Corylus avellana) in flower: crimson female flowers, yellow catkin male flowers. Photo: Andrea Deri, Sue Godfrey Nature Park, Deptford, London, 1 January 2023

Before I signed up to add my hazelnut observation, I took a screenshot of the “Add a Record” webpage on 5 January 2023 that showed the first hazelnut flower sighting on 4 January 2023. (Fig.5.)

Figure 5 Screenshot of Nature's Calendar, Woodland Trust. Photo: Andrea Deri, @20:34 pm GMT 5 January 2023

Hazelnut first flowering was among the recently recorded data of the Nature’s Calendar (Fig. 5.) My observation of hazelnut flowers on 1 January 2023 was not extraordinary but earlier than the one featured online. Hazelnut is expected to be in flower in early January according to Nature Calendar (downloadable pdf). But as early as 1 January? To answer this question, I had to register to enter my data. When I entered my observation date, I received an automatic note, all in red: 

“This date falls outside of the expected range

The date you have entered is unusually early or late for this species and event; please double check the record. If it’s correct we’d like to know more about your observation, so please add a comment before clicking ‘next’ to continue. If possible, a photo is very useful too. Please note that your record will not appear on the live map until it has been checked by the Nature’s Calendar team.”

For evidence, I uploaded one of my photos of the hazelnut flowers (Fig.4.) and a description of the place and circumstances. My hazelnut flowering observations may turn out to be some of the earliest this year. To prove or refute this statement I rely on the Woodland Trust’s online database, the Nature’s Calendar team’s peer-review and keen monitoring of fellow citizen scientists. This type of on-land & online live collaboration in monitoring the slightest phenological changes is gaining increasing importance in addressing local impacts of climatic changes.

Will hazelnut flower earlier and earlier in the future? Only regular visitors can answer this question by careful monitoring the same hazelnut shrub and recording the date of the first flowers and uploading the data to Nature Calendar.

Nature Calendar invites citizen scientists to monitor a carefully selected list of species of shrubs, trees, flowers, grasses, fungi, birds, insects and amphibians throughout the year. Their changes over time will give us information on how these species (plants, animals and mushroom) adapt to the unfolding climatic changes. Phenological change data contributes to better decisions in wildlife conservation, among others.  

While I was browsing, I came across several websites and webpages on various other decisions and local actions related to climate change adaptation. For example: What can I do about climate change in my garden?  What local residents are doing in the boroughs of Lewisham and Greenwich about the climate crisis:  Climate Action Lewisham, Climate Home – a home of creativity, imagination and community activism by young people, Lewisham Climate Action Bond as an example of Local Climate Bonds, Lewisham Climate Emergency Declaration and Action Plan, CAPE Informing Local Action on Climate Change / London Borough of Lewisham, The Climate Emergency website of Royal Borough of Greenwich, Carbon Neutral Greenwich, Greenwich Climate Network. 

Some of the activities and organisations were familiar to me, I was taken aback by others: ‘How could I miss them?  I live here!” A fast-changing landscape of actions and online information. Having saved these sites to my further actions, I also realised some of these online contents could be highly ephemeral. Uploading my list of URLs to the UKWA Climate Change collection saved local digital content for future research on climatic changes.  

Sauntering through streets, gardens and parks has turned into an archival journey, connecting past, present and future. Fit for the first day of the year. Fit for any days, anywhere where your interest, experience, and local knowledge crosses climatic changes.  

The Natural History Museum’s community science webpage lists a broad range of UK wildlife monitoring activities related to climatic changes, including the New Year Plant Hunt of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland and the upcoming annual Big Garden Birdwatch (27-28 January 2023) organised by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds since 1979. 

Contribute to the web archive
Your next walk or online stroll may spark you to nominate some of your local climate initiatives (civil society, governmental, business, media, arts and academia) to the UK Web Archive Climate Change Collection. Many thanks for your consideration. 

By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives, The British Library

The Irish Sporting Lives workshop and symposium took place at the Ulster University campus in Belfast from 11-12 November 2022. Day one took the form of a half day workshop aimed at  PhD/ECR researchers. It focused both on imparting knowledge about how to research historical figures and how to write sporting biographies. There were three sessions in the workshop:

1. Margaret Roberts: It’s not what you research… it’s the way that you research it: that’s what gets results
2. Helena Byrne: Examining sports history through digitised and born digital resources
3. Turlough O’Riordan & Terry Clavin: Writing sporting lives

The slide deck and speaker notes on ‘Examining sports history through digitised and born digital resources’ are now available in the British Library Shared Research Repository under a CC BY 4.0 Attribution licence. 

The running time for this session was 70 minutes, therefore, many of the slides were discussed only briefly to allow more time for the activity phase of the workshop. The slides accompanying the notes can be edited by anyone to suit different session lengths. If more time is available, more time can be spent on exploring the different options discussed in the slides. As there was limited time in this workshop, no live demos were given during the presentation. The workshop focused on the subject of sport, but it could be adapted to suit any subject area. 

For more general web archiving training materials at a beginner level, please see the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Training Materials page: https://netpreserve.org/web-archiving/training-materials/  

The agenda for this session covered: 

• Warm Up Activity
• Digital Resources
• Digitised Newspapers
• Web Archives
• Hackathon – Preserve Irish sporting heritage online. 
• Wrap Up Activity

The session mostly focused on using web archives and only briefly covered digitised newspapers because this was covered in more depth in the first session led by Margaret Roberts.

The warm-up activity collected anonymous information on what type of academic background the workshop participants were from, what their general level of awareness of web archives were, and in particular their awareness of the UK Web Archive. Participation in this activity was optional and not all participants responded to every question. Most of the participants came from a history background while others were from subjects including English Literature, Law, Sports Management or Independent Researchers who research a wide variety of sports. 

There were twelve responses to the question ‘Do you understand the difference between the terms digitised and born digital?’. Six respondents replied ‘yes’, while three said ‘no’ and three said ‘not sure’. In the ‘Digital Resources’ section of the presentation, the difference between these two terms was clarified during the presentation. More in depth user studies on web archive research conducted by Healy et. al. (2022) and Costea (2018) have highlighted that there is often confusion amongst researchers on the difference between a digital library/digital archive, a database and a web archive.

There were thirteen responses to the question ‘Have you ever used a web archive?’. Six respondents replied 'yes', while four said ’no’ and three said ‘not sure’. There were twelve responses to the question ‘Have you ever used the UK Web Archive?’. Four respondents replied ‘yes’, while six said ‘no’ and two said ‘not sure’.

The session highlighted different ways that the researchers could use DIY web archiving techniques to mitigate against the impact link rot and content drift could have on their research. 

In the hackathon part of the session, participants were tasked to use some of the DIY web archiving strategies discussed to preserve the Irish sporting heritage. Participants could choose from  two options: 

1. Add online content used in your research to the relevant web archives. 
2. Review what web content has already been preserved from your area of study in the UK Web Archive Sports Collections. Then select online content from the web to nominate to the UK Web Archive.

Although there was approximately 25 minutes available at the end of this presentation for this activity, it would really need more time and if possible pre-workshop preparation to get maximum results for this activity. 

To wrap up this session, participants were asked two questions about how likely they were to use web archives in their research. Firstly, on a scale of 1 meaning very unlikely to 5 very likely, participants were asked ‘How likely are you to use a web archive as a resource for your research?’. Seven participants answered this question and the aggregated response was 4.4. Secondly, eight participants responded to the question ‘How likely are you to save content you view online in a web archive?’. This was also a scale question with 1 meaning very unlikely to 5 very likely, and the aggregated response was 3.4. 

Although the workshop elicited a small sample of results, they show that there is an interest in using web archives in academic research, not just as a reference source but as a way for managing online citations in the field of sports studies. It would be beneficial to the research community if those teaching research method classes could incorporate web archive training into their classes. The training materials published through the British Library Shared Research Repository can be adapted to suit any subject area.

References:

Healy, S., Byrne, H., Schmid, K., Bingham, N., Holownia, O., Kurzmeier, M., & Jansma, R. (2022). Skills, Tools, and Knowledge Ecologies in Web Archive Research. WARCnet Special Report. Aarhus, Denmark: WARCnet, https://cc.au.dk/fileadmin/dac/Projekter/WARCnet/Healy_et_al_Skills_Tools_and_Knowledge_Ecologies.pdf    

Costea, M.-D. (2018). Report on the Scholarly Use of Web Archives. Aarhus, Denmark: NetLab. Retrieved 2019-08-30, from http://netlab.dk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Costea_Report_on_the_Scholarly_Use_of_Web_Archives.pdf   

By Ash Green, CLIP LGBTQ+ Network, and Goldsmith University

The LGBTQ+ Lives Online UK Web Archive collection currently holds over 600 sites, web pages, blogs etc focused on the LGBTQ+ experience of people in the UK. Community and the coming together of individuals is a key aspect of the LGBTQ+ experience, and this is particularly reflected in sites acting as networks; focused on Pride events; and visibility and remembrance days such as Bi Visibility Day, Lesbian Visibility Week, Trans Day of Remembrance, International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia. These events, networks and days are there to support the community; remind others outside the community we are part of, that we exist; that we celebrate who we are; that the need to highlight and address inequalities continues to remain important despite LGBTQ+ people having existed for millennia.

Gotta Be Worth It from Pexels: 

An example of sites in the UK Web Archive under some of these banners include: LGBT Mummies (aiming to support LGBT+ women & people globally on the path to motherhood or parenthood); London Gaymers (a safe place for the LGBT gaming community in London and across the UK to connect with like minded individuals); African Rainbow Family (a non-for-profit charitable organisation that support lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender intersexual and queer (LGBTIQ) people of African heritage and the wider Black Asian Minority Ethnic groups); Pride Sports (a focus on increasing participation in sport by lesbians, gay men, bisexual and transgender people as well as the wider community). As you can see from the examples given, many of the informal networks are focused on where other aspects of an individual’s life overlaps with being an LGBTQ+ person.

We also have Pride sites archived within the collection, including both local (Pride In Surrey , Glasgow’s Mardi Gla , York Pride) and nationwide (LGBTQYMRU ) events. Before the pandemic they were mainly face-to-face events, but between 2020 and 2022, there was an increase in online events as many sought to keep LGBTQ+ people connected in a safe way.

We would like to build the collection of UK sites focused around Pride and awareness/visibility days. We don’t limit our collection of sites to big organisations only – as we have said before, all LGBTQ+ content is welcome, including personal content if it is published in the UK. And even though we would like to develop the areas of the collection highlighted above, we are also still happy to receive submissions around any aspects of LGBTQ+ Lives Online. So, if you know of any online content you think we should be archiving within this collection please nominate it here.

Under the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations 2013, the UKWA can archive UK published websites, but are only able to make the archived version available to people outside the Legal Deposit Libraries Reading Rooms, if the website owner has given permission. The UK Legal Deposit Libraries are the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Libraries and Trinity College Dublin Library. If you’re curious about what is in the LGBTQ+ collection you can browse through it here.

By Daniela Major, PhD Student, School of Advanced Studies, University of London

Note: This blog post was written before the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The Jubilee collection has documented the end of an extraordinary reign and will hopefully serve as a basis for future researchers to understand this historical moment.

Before I started my placement at the UK Web Archive, my project idea was to build a collection about the History of London. I had thought it would give me an opportunity to delve into history blogs and history websites, and to explore how people interpret historical events; it was, however, a Jubilee year, and the opportunity came up instead to curate a collection about this very modern event, which would, moreover, unfold as I built the collection.

The particular challenges of this exercise were very attractive to someone who still considers herself an historian. It is fairly straightforward to build a collection about events that have gone past and that have been analysed by countless historians. It is a very different thing to curate a collection about events that are happening, whose consequences remain unknown. In this sense, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee was a great opportunity because in many ways Queen Elizabeth II already belongs to History. It is entirely possible to historicise her existence and her years in power. It is also possible to use her reign as a way to look into the making of modern Britain and modern Europe, as she was present through many key historical moments in the last 70 years.

A priority which was defined early on was representing different parts of the UK, rather than focusing only on the big cities. We looked into how towns, villages and cities were celebrating the Jubilee, what events they were organizing, where street parties would take place and how councils involved local communities in the celebrations. From a geographical representation came the necessity to represent different voices and opinions, both from the UK and the Commonwealth. It was vital the collection didn’t turn out to be laudatory. Future researchers would be interested in knowing whether there was resistance to the monarchy and whether consensus was real or fabricated.

As with so many questions in History, the answer is both yes and yes. Yes, there is resistance, but yes there is genuine and even widespread appreciation for the Queen.

For the majority of my academic career, I have looked to the past to study it. Historians are used to question the archives. We have to question the silences and the omissions, we have to remember who created records, who kept them, and why. Curating this collection placed me firmly on the other side of these interrogations. I was the one deciding what should go into the collection, what should be kept for posterity. The web is vast, content is being produced every minute of every hour. It is not conceivable to include everything. The responsibility is enormous, but it made me all the more aware of the need to hear different sides, so as to not exclude voices which have often been silenced in the past.

The Web affords researchers the possibility to glimpse into facets of life and points of view that many previous historical records have omitted. It is a rich source with enormous democratic potential, and one which will become even more essential in the years to come; it must be protected and looked after. The work that web archivists do, and that I have been privileged enough to take part in, is vital to safeguard the history of the present and the future.

View the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, 2022 collection

Also the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, 2012 collection 

by Caterina Loriggio, UEFA Women’s EURO Arts and Heritage Lead

Jan Lyons (Manchester Corinthians) and Gail Redston (Manchester City) looking at the 1921 Ban. Part of Trafford's heritage programme. Photo by Rachel Adams for UEFA WEURO 2022 heritage programme

The UK Web Archive has been collaborating with the UEFA Women’s EURO 2022 Arts and Heritage Programme to develop the UEFA Women's Euro England 2022 web archive collection. In this guest blog post, we hear about the wider arts and heritage programme around the tournament from Caterina Loriggio.

The UEFA Women’s EURO 2022 arts and heritage programme was designed to promote community engagement, develop cultural leadership, support health and wellbeing, reinforce civic pride and to support local economies post-pandemic. Host City partners (Rotherham, Sheffield, Trafford, Wigan, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Brent, Hounslow, Brighton, and Southampton) were all keen to amplify the opportunity the tournament provided to engage and inspire their residents and visitors.

The £3m programme was supported by National Lottery players through Arts Council England and National Lottery Heritage Fund grants and through funding from the Host Cities. It included four arts commissions, eight museum/archive exhibitions, eight outdoor exhibitions, heritage outreach and education programmes, 45 memory films and new online content covering the history of the women’s game. The project also researched for the first time the full line-up of all the women who have played for England over the past 50 years. Many of those women will be honoured at Wembley Stadium on October 7th in front of a sell-out crowd when they will take a lap of honour during half time in the England USA match.

It was the first time The FA had ever delivered a cultural programme. A key priority for The FA is to establish female role models for both girls and boys. When Host City partners requested a cultural programme to support the tournament the Association saw that this could be a great opportunity to further fulfil this objective. It was also clear that partnering with cultural organisations in Hosts Cities, and national institutions such as the UK Web Archive and British Library would also be a great way to promote the UK’s cultural sector and would be a very effective tool to capture, for the first time on a national scale, the hidden history of women’s football.

Prior to writing funding applications, I led, with the support of the Football Supporters’ Association, four online fan consultations to ensure the programme spoke to the wants of women’s football fans. We also commissioned the organisation ‘64 Million Artists’ to lead half-term virtual workshops for young people aged 12 – 18 in Host Cities (many of whom played football). The fans and young people’s feedback was shared with artists, archivists and curators and was clearly reflected in all elements of the programme. The fans were clear that they could ‘never get enough history’.

Archives and contemporary collecting played an important part in the heritage programme. It was apparent many stories of women’s football (fans as well as players) had been lost already and that women who had played during the ban (1921-1970) were of an age that if we did not collect their stories now, then there was a real risk that they might never be captured. As well as collecting physical objects for museums and archives like caps, pennants, and programmes, there was a significant degree of online archiving. Many of the Host Cities created online exhibitions, hosted films, and imagery on digital archive platforms and digitally captured objects which retired footballers were happy to loan but not donate. Nationally we made 36 memory films live on The FA website. These will be moved to EnglandFootball.com in time for the 50th Anniversary of the Lionesses in November, plus there will be some new content made especially for the anniversary. We were greatly supported in our programme by The National Football Museum and Getty Images who gave us access to their photography archives, which greatly enriched all our work. We also sought to create content for the future by commissioning Getty photographers and by running fan and young people’s photography campaigns to capture the atmosphere of match day and the fan experience beyond the pitch. Some of these images will be shared in an online Getty Images Gallery to be launched in November.

It is hoped that the learnings from this programme will help to secure cultural content in future UK bids for major sporting events. I hope that archiving and collecting will remain important components in all these future projects.

Related Links
This is the ninth blog post published so far about the women’s Euros, the others can be found on the UK Web Archive blog under the 'sports' tag.

There is still an active call for nominations for the UEFA Women's Euro England 2022 web archive collection. Anyone can suggest UK published websites to be included in the archive by filling in our nomination form.

by Sharon Healy, Maynooth University (Project Lead)

The WARST team are delighted to announce the publication of a WARCnet Special Report, titled: Skills, Tools and Knowledge Ecologies in Web Archive Research. This study is part of a collaborative project by researchers from Maynooth University, the British Library, the International Internet Preservation Consortium, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the University of Siegen. The research team are all members of Web ARChive studies network researching web domains and events (WARCnet).

The study focuses on individuals around the globe who participate in web archive research, in the context of web archiving, curation, and the use of web archives and archived web content for research or other purposes. We consider web archive research to be representative of the processes and activities described in Archive-It’s web archiving life cycle model from appraisal, acquisition, and preservation, to replay, access, use and reuse (Bragg & Hannah, 2013).

The methodology for the study entailed desk research, participation in WARCnet meeting discussions, and an online questionnaire. The study sought to identify and document the skills, tools, and knowledge required to achieve a broad range of goals within the web archiving life cycle and to explore the challenges for participation in web archive research, and the interludes of such challenges across communities of practice. We suggest that there is a perpetual need to examine the roles of skills, tools, and methods associated with the web archiving life cycle as long as internet, web and software technologies keep advancing, upgrading, and changing.

The Executive summary offers an overview of the findings, and is translated into Danish, French, Spanish and Catalan.

The Report is available to download from WARCnet website:

https://cc.au.dk/fileadmin/dac/Projekter/WARCnet/Healy_et_al_Skills_Tools_and_Knowledge_Ecologies.pdf

A section of the Report that focused on the software, tools and methods used in the web archive research life cycle was presented in a poster at iPres 2022.

By Helena Byrne, Nicola Bingham, Dr Andrew Jackson, British Library, Eilidh MacGlone, National Library of Scotland and Caylin Smith, Cambridge University Libraries

iPres is the largest international conference on digital preservation. The conference has been held every year since 2004. The 2022 edition was hosted by the DPC in Glasgow. This meant that the official conference website ipres2022.scot was within scope for the UK Web Archive to preserve. You can view the archived version of the website here: 

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20220914105705/https://ipres2022.scot/ 

iPres 2022 was held from Monday 12 to Friday 16 September. There were a mix of presentations over the week with workshops, long papers, short papers, poster presentations and lightning talks as well as show and tell sessions in the form of a ‘Bake Off’. On the final day of the conference, there were a number of site visits to organisations that are running a digital preservation programme. 

This year’s conference also coincided with the 20th anniversary celebrations of the DPC, as well as the DPC Preservation Awards that are held every two years. In 2020, the UK Web Archive won The National Archives (UK) Award for Safeguarding the Digital Legacy at the virtual Digital Preservation Awards 2020 ceremony.

There are also a number of awards given at iPres in various categories. This year’s winner of the Angela Dappert Memorial Award established in 2021, was Dr Andrew Jackson, Technical Lead for the UK Web Archive for his presentation ‘Design Patterns in Digital Preservation: Understanding Information Flows’. 

Many UK Web Archive colleagues from the British Library, National Library of Scotland and Cambridge University Library attended the conference both as delegates and presenters. In this blog post they have reported back on their conference experience.

British Library

Dr Andrew Jackson
As well as presenting my Design Patterns paper, I was also involved in a workshop on format registries in digital preservation. Both sessions were well-attended and seemed to go well, and I’m planning to post about both in more detail in the future. 

I particularly enjoyed the session on DNA storage, especially because of Euan Cochrane’s approach: working with a DNA lab at Yale University to independently verify the work being done by Twist Bioscience.  It’s still a long way from being a storage option we can depend on, but it’s starting to look like it might actually happen!

There were a lot of good quality papers but I particularly enjoyed “Monitoring Bodleian Libraries' Repositories with Micro Services” presented by James Mooney. The overall approach was very similar to how I like to work, from the design of the overall architecture (federated monitoring of resources in situ rather than centralised and ingest-driven) to the style of implementation (microservices combined with best-in-class open source service components).

Nicola Bingham
This was the first iPres conference I have attended. I wish I could have been there in person but due to practicalities, I attended online. Some of my highlights were the presentation from William Kilbride in which he stated that one of the aims of the DPC was to build “the social infrastructure of digital preservation” (as opposed to focussing on technical aspects), which I think has always been true but is now more so than ever especially when it comes to diversifying our archives and enabling communities to have agency in telling their own stories, as articulated by Tamar Evangelista-Dougherty in her keynote. 

Other highlights were hearing from Garth Stewart, Head of Digital Records at National Records Scotland. Garth presented on NRS’s two year project to ingest and make available Scottish Government Cabinet Records and had practical advice for negotiating the transfer of good quality metadata from the depositors - it’s all about gaining trust and explaining to depositors that the quality of metadata provided impacts the experience of the end users. I was also intrigued that they had the challenge of building and maintaining two access solutions, one for journalist access and one for the public. 

A final highlight for me was the long paper, “A Digital Preservation Wikibase” by Kenneth Seals-Nutt of Yale University. Kenneth’s presentation set down the practical steps taken by Yale University Library’s department of digital preservation to implement a Wikibase instance and how this was used to transform a data set related to software into a knowledge base using technologies of the Semantic Web. This is particularly useful to us at the UK Web Archive as we consider the next steps in our web archiving roadmap. 

Helena Byrne
This was my first time attending iPres but I wasn’t able to make it in person so I was delighted that they had an option to join the conference remotely. I was also involved in a collaborative poster presentation with Katharina Schmid (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) and Sharon Healy (Maynooth University). Our poster ‘Exploring Software, Tools and Methods used in Web Archive Research’ was part of a bigger study that will be published through WARCnet in the coming weeks. 

There were so many great talks, especially around inclusion and diversity in the wider digital preservation field. This along with activism was also a common theme in the three keynotes. These were all very different in scope so it is hard to pick one over the other but I will definitely be watching back over these in the coming weeks and I will share them with colleagues when they are published online.

National Library of Scotland

Eilidh MacGlone
I was grateful to have the opportunity to attend iPres this year. This was my first experience of the conference, and it was a happy one. There were lots of opportunities to meet up with new people and catch up with those I knew from the preservation world. And it was useful! The continuous improvement models are a very handy way to set achievable targets to professionals who are often the only preservationists in their organisation. I know this will be useful to me, even though I am not on my own. I was fascinated to hear about DNA data storage, which although not yet operating at scale, has interesting properties of robustness at room temperature.

You can read more about one of Eilidh’s takeaways from iPres in her blog post - iPres report: a simple workshop exercise using Robust Links.

Cambridge University Library

Caylin Smith
Glasgow 2022 was the second in-person iPres I’ve attended; I previously attended in 2019 when the conference was held in Amsterdam. I was grateful to attend again this year to present about ongoing research as well as catch up with friends and colleagues in the field and meet some new faces. 

Along with Sara Day-Thomson (Edinburgh University Library) and Patricia Falcao (TATE), I led a workshop on the first day of the conference. Titled “Preserving Complex Digital Objects: Revisited”, this workshop picked up on the workshop we gave at iPres in 2019 and focused on supporting the collection management of digital materials for which few or no solutions currently exist. 

There were many great submissions to iPres this year. One paper on the topic of web archiving that stood out to me was “These Crawls Can Talk. Context Information for Web Collections” by Susanne van den Eijkel and Daniel Steinmeier from the KB (National Library of the Netherlands). I’m looking forward to thinking further about their research in the context of web archiving activities at Cambridge University Libraries. 

The next iPres conference will be held in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois in the U.S.A. from September 19-22, 2023.

By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives, The British Library

This blog post gives an overview of our sports related activities for the year to celebrate Sporting Heritage Day 2022 

2022 has been, and continues to be, a really busy year for international sport especially in the UK. The Winter Olympics in Beijing and the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham were  always scheduled to take place in 2022 years in advance. But as the Covid-19 pandemic caused disruption to many events in 2020 and 2021 many sporting events were postponed. The UEFA Women's Euros and the Rugby League World Cup, both hosted by England, were moved from 2021 to 2022, meaning that 2022 was even busier than normal in terms of major sporting events.

Sports has always been an Important part of the UK Web Archive so 2022 has been a busy year for us so far. Since 2017, sports has been grouped into three separate collections. 

Sports Collection - https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/1768 

Sports: Football - https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/1490 

Sports: International Events - https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/2315 

The UK Web Archive regularly publishes blog posts about sport, which can be found here: https://blogs.bl.uk/webarchive/sports/

2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics

As members of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) both the British Library and the National Library of Scotland contributed to the IIPC Content Development Group (CDG) 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics collection.

The Olympics took place in Beijing from 4 to 20 February 2022, while the Paralympics were also in Beijing from 4 to 13 March 2022. 

The collection archived 863 items which included whole websites, subsections or individual pages from websites. These items are from 38 countries and 24 different languages are represented in the collection. Topics covered both events on and off the sporting field.

Browse the collection here:

https://archive-it.org/collections/18422 

UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022

The UEFA Women's Euro 2022 competition took place across England from July 6 to July 31, 2022. Although the event is over we are still collecting websites about the Euros from around the UK till the end of October. 

This collection covers both the sporting and cultural achievements of the event. There are over 275 items in the UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 collection.

So far we have published seven blog posts about the Women’s Euros and there are still more to come. They can be found on the UK Web Archive blog with the sports tag here:

https://blogs.bl.uk/webarchive/sports/ 

Browse the collection here: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/4278

Commonwealth Games Birmingham 2022

Commonwealth Games Birmingham 2022 ran from 28 July to 8 August. Although the sporting events are over the cultural programme is continuing for a number of weeks. This means that UKWA still has an open call for nominations for this collection.

The collection covers both the sporting and cultural achievements as well as the social impact of this mega event. So far there are 434 items in the Commonwealth Games Birmingham 2022 collection.

Browse the collection here: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/4228 

Rugby League World Cup 2021

The Rugby League World Cup 2021 will take place from 15 October to 19 November 2022 across England. 

This event is unique in that the men's, women's and wheelchair competition all take place alongside each other. You can nominate your UK published Rugby League World Cup content here: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/nominate 

Updates on this collection will be published on the UK Web Archive blog and Twitter account. 

When published this collection will sit as a subsection of the Sports: International Events collection on the UKWA Topics & Themes page and will be available here: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/2315 

Access to the collections 

All of the archived content in the IIPC CDG 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics collection is open access. CDG collaborative collections are archived using the Archive-It platform meaning that all archived content is open access, although a publisher may  request its removal under the Internet Archives’ general terms and conditions

All CDG collections can be viewed here: https://archive-it.org/home/IIPC 

UK Web Archive Content has a mix of on-site and remote access due to the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations implemented in 2013. The full manifest of  content selected for UK Web Archive collections is visible on the website but access to individual archived websites depends on permission being granted by website publishers.  A note under each title informs users whether they can view the archived website online or whether they need to visit a UK Legal Deposit Library to view the archived content. 

All curated collections can be found on the Topics and Themes page of the UK Web Archive website: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/category 

Get involved

The UK Web Archive is a partnership of the six UK legal Deposit Libraries and works with other external partners in order to expand  our subject expertise. We can’t curate the whole of the UK web on our own, however - we need your help to ensure that information, discussions and creative output related to sports is preserved for future generations.

Anyone can suggest UK published websites to be included in the UK Web Archive by filling in our nomination form: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/nominate