UK Web Archive blog

75 posts categorized "Contemporary Britain"

08 May 2025

Marking 80 Years: Documenting VE and VJ Day Commemoration in the UK Web Archive

By Nicola Bingham, Lead Curator of Web Archives, British Library

Home page of the ve-vjday80.gov.uk website
Home page of the ve-vjday80.gov.uk website

This year marks a significant national milestone: the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. With Victory in Europe (VE) Day falling on 8th May and Victory over Japan (VJ) Day on 15th August, commemorations are planned across the UK to honour the conclusion of a conflict that reshaped the world.

To document this anniversary, the UK Web Archive is curating a special collection titled "VE / VJ Day 80", which will record how people and communities across the UK are commemorating the end of WWII, from national ceremonies to local grassroots events.

Collection Scope

This curated collection focuses on UK-based websites documenting commemorative events, public activities, and community involvement related to VE/VJ Day 80. Rather than a detailed historical retrospective, the collection aims to reflect contemporary responses and engagement with this anniversary.

Key Aspects of UK Commemorations

The collection includes a wide variety of commemorative themes and activities such as:

· National Events: Organised by groups like the Royal British Legion, including parades and memorials.

· Local Celebrations: Street parties, community gatherings, and regional events.

· Church Services: Remembrance services held nationwide.

· Beacon Lighting: Symbolic ceremonies at dusk.

· Remembrance Readings: Recitals of "The Tribute" and similar dedications.

· Veteran Involvement: Honouring the voices and presence of those who served.

· Contrasting voices or critical perspectives of the commemorations.

Why We Are Archiving This

By collecting these websites now, we’re creating a rich and enduring resource for future researchers, historians, educators, and the general public. This collection will preserve not only official narratives but also grassroots and personal perspectives, reflecting the diversity of the UK’s commemorative landscape.

One recent example of how the UK Web supports research is the work of Dr Liam Markey, whose blog post, published earlier this week, describes how he has used archived web content.

Between 2018 and 2023, Liam completed a PhD at the University of Liverpool in collaboration with the British Library, examining how remembrance practices in Britain, particularly the concept of military victimhood, shape national identity and reflect militaristic thinking. His work highlights the value of digital resources like the UK Web Archive in documenting contemporary remembrance culture.

How You Can Contribute

We welcome nominations of websites, blogs, and social media accounts that reflect VE/VJ Day 80 commemorations and perspectives.

Are you organising a public or community event?

Are you sharing your thoughts or experiences online?

If so, we’d love to hear from you.

Please email your suggestions to: [email protected] 

Although the UK Web Archive website is currently offline, our team is actively capturing web content using remotely hosted systems, ensuring this material is preserved for the future.

Here are a few examples of sites already being archived:

Royal British Legion – Remembering the End of WWII (https://www.britishlegion.org.uk/getinvolved/events/remembranceevents/rememberingtheendofthesecondworldwar)

VE Day 80 Community Events (https://www.veday80.org.uk/)

VE/VJ Day 80 (https://ve-vjday80.gov.uk/)

English Cathedrals – VE Day Services (https://www.englishcathedrals.co.uk/latestnews/veday808thmay2025asharedmomentofcelebration/)

Breckland Council – Remembrance Grants & Readings (https://www.breckland.gov.uk/article/24080/VEVJDay80AnniversaryGrants)

Royal Navy – WWII Veterans’ Stories (https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news/2025/january/06/20250106ww2veteransurgedtocomeforwardtomark80thanniversary)

Beacon Lighting Guide (Glinton Parish Council) (https://glintonpc.gov.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2024/07/VEDay80AnniversaryGuidev19.pdf)

VE Day Blog Posts from the British Library

This is one of multiple blog posts being published across the British Library blogs this week:

UK Web Archive: https://blogs.bl.uk/webarchive/2025/05/digital-memory-and-the-militarised-past.html 

European Studies: https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2025/05/remembering-sacrifice-celebrating-freedom.html

Newsroom: https://blogs.bl.uk/thenewsroom/2025/04/ve-day-in-the-news.html 

Social Science: https://blogs.bl.uk/socialscience/2025/05/ve-day-voices-from-history-.html 

Untold Lives: https://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2025/04/children-in-war-time.html 

06 May 2025

Digital Memory and the Militarised Past: Commemorating Britain’s World Wars in the 21st Century

By Dr Liam Markey, University of Liverpool

This blog post will explore the immediate legacies of the First World War centenary in Britain, looking towards the culmination of the ongoing commemoration of the Second World War’s 80th anniversary, with VE and VJ day being commemorated in May and August of this year respectively. It describes how discourse surrounding both world wars has shaped British attitudes and behaviours concerning conflict and military service over the last century, and how changing demographics may serve to consolidate these beliefs in the coming century. Special attention is paid to mixed media texts collected and held by the British Library, demonstrating the significance of the UK Web Archive (UKWA) in particular as a repository of counter-culture discourse in the context of British militarism.

A Second Century of Remembrance
As a response to the centenary of the First World War, between 2018 and 2023 I undertook a PhD at the University of Liverpool in collaboration with the British Library. My research cast a critical gaze upon the act of remembrance in Britain since the end of the First World War, with special attention paid to the concept of ‘military victimhood’ and its potential to mediate militaristic modes of thinking. The project was embarked upon in the wake of the national commemoration of the centenary of the First World War, a watershed moment in Britain which prompted the production of a myriad of state-funded cultural and educational events.

As David Cameron announced in 2012, British commemoration of the centenary would serve to,

“provide the foundations upon which to build an enduring cultural and educational legacy, to put young people front and centre in our commemoration and to ensure that the sacrifice and service of a hundred years ago is still remembered in a hundred years’ time.”


While such an important historical moment arguably provides an invaluable opportunity for critical reflection, my research ascertained that, largely, the centenary instead engendered a consolidation of, and recommitment to, traditional forms of remembrance. Ultimately, the foundations that the centenary provided were not ground-breaking, rather they had already been established during, and enacted since, the end of the First World War itself. This next century of commemoration, as envisioned by Cameron, would be cast in the image of the last, anchored upon the rituals and practices of what is referred to as the ‘1919 model’.

This in and of itself can be regarded as potentially problematic, as my research, and the work of many other scholars, demonstrates the proclivity of such forms of commemoration to perpetuate the core tenets of a militaristic ideology; seeing war glorified, justified, and normalised. This is largely achieved through the sanitisation of war’s power to victimise, with emphasis placed on an idealised vision of warfare and military service. ‘Official’ or ‘dominant’ narratives of commemoration also emphasise the unifying power the rituals of the 1919 model, such as the two-minute silence or the wearing of a poppy, have among the British population and the positive effect enactment has in relation to British victims of war. Commemorative discourse overwhelmingly emphasises notions of debt that the public are duty-bound to fulfil, while avoiding direct reference to war’s inherent violence and propensity to produce victims.

This depiction of warfare present in commemorative practices was chosen to serve a very specific purpose, as a way of alleviating the suffering of the bereaved by acknowledging that their loved ones died in service of a noble ideal. However, with much, if not all, of those for whom the 1919 model was created having now passed from the British population, sentiments of military service as being inherently glorious, core to dominant commemorative narratives, serve to sanitise war for generations of individuals with no personal experience of war’s traumatic reality.

Alongside overt references to war as glorious and necessary within dominant commemorative narratives, my research also uncovered the role of the ‘commemorative deviant’. These are individuals who choose to commemorate war in a manner outside of the official purview, and as such are vilified in the national mainstream media, encouraging others to condemn rather than replicate such behaviours. The majority of such depictions come from print texts taken from three mainstream British newspapers: The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror, and The Times, collected for analysis from the British Library’s Newsroom. These newspaper texts serve to reinforce specific beliefs and behaviours concerning remembrance over the last century that ultimately perpetuate, rather than challenge, militaristic notions.

Mainstream narratives purport that since the end of the First World War commemoration has been static, with its enactment based on a general consensus, and those rare deviant individuals represent an anomaly rather than a pattern of behaviour visible throughout the last century. However, through access to the UKWA, and close collaboration with the UKWA team, I was able to create a unique digital dataset which challenged such notions and provided a far more expansive view of commemoration as enacted in Britain since 1918. Beyond official black and white narratives of morally righteous consensus and villainous deviance, digital texts demonstrated the complexity of British remembrance. They provided an insight into ‘ground-up’ commemorative initiatives, uncovering attitudes more often than not absent from the mainstream media due to their potential to undermine notions key to the proliferation of dominant commemorative narratives.

Websites collected by the UKWA demonstrated the rich variety of methods by which war has been commemorated in Britain since the First World War, with many serving to challenge and deprivilege assumptions inherent within dominant narratives. These ‘counter’-narratives illustrated the vastness of the category of military victims, many of whom, such as civilians or enemy soldiers, are absent from mainstream commemorative discourse, and whose existence serve to undermine notions of militarism. Many instances of ‘deviancy’ in mainstream thought became in this context simply an alternative perspective, which ultimately facilitated the broadening of knowledge concerning the enactment of British remembrance over the last century.

Take for instance the existence of the white poppy, a symbol denigrated by newspaper texts in the sample as disrespectful and a direct contributor to the suffering of military victims, such as disabled ex-servicemen or the bereaved. Digital texts provide expansive contextual information, highlighting that the white poppy was itself incepted by ex-servicemen and relatives of the war dead as a commitment to peace, remembrance of all victims of war, and as a direct challenge to a militaristic ideology. Digital texts also highlight the existence of otherwise marginalised individuals, such as dissenting ex-servicemen, conscientious objectors, soldiers ‘shot at dawn’, or soldiers severely disfigured as a result of their military service.

Alongside an expanded purview regarding representation of military victims, the digital texts collected from the UKWA also provided access to the thoughts and feelings of the average British citizen, many of which clash with mainstream declarations of consensus and unity. Message boards and amateur websites serve as a medium for dissenting viewpoints, exhibiting the democratising power of the internet. Ultimately, the UKWA provided a much fuller picture of remembrance than the one evident in mainstream media, providing a platform for individuals who have not featured at the forefront of commemoration over the last century, but are nevertheless integral components in wider British narratives of war.

Second World War 80th Anniversary

Seven years on from the centenary of the First World War, we now find ourselves approaching the culmination of the first decade of the second century of British remembrance, and at the apex of the Second World War’s 80th anniversary, concluding in the commemoration of the victories in Europe and Japan; VE Day on 8th May, and VJ Day on 15th August respectively. Preceding the commemoration of victory in 1945, we have also seen other major historical moments of the Second World War commemorated since 2019, such as the Battle of Britain and the D-Day landings.

Thus far, these tentpole national commemorative events have largely been celebrations of victory rather than meditations on the destructive nature of war. Unlike the First, which has largely been portrayed in popular culture as a futile endeavour, the Second World War stands apart as a just war, a struggle between good and evil. In recent years, it is through the lens of the Second World War that official narratives of war in Britain have been constructed, providing a useful template with which previous and later conflicts can be created in the guise of. Such a foregrounding of a single war in mainstream narratives can result in the depoliticising and decontextualising of conflict, providing an ahistorical view of war as a natural and inevitable continuum. While responses to the First World War during its centenary did in part deal with the ambiguous nature of its necessity in being fought, the Second World War is far more widely accepted as entirely justified, as a national struggle for survival. While there is no doubt that defeat of fascism is a cause worthy of celebration, it must not serve to enable a sanitisation of war’s reality by colouring our perception of conflict overall.

The 80th anniversary of the Second World War may well enable dominant narratives of war to become further entrenched in the national psyche, particularly as more and more individuals with first-hand experience of total war pass from the population. For a new generation of Britons, whose primary connection to war is through the mass media, and indeed commemorative events, there is a real danger that a sanitised and depoliticised view of warfare will become the norm, especially through an ever more celebratory depiction adopted by mainstream commemorative initiatives.

As with the First World War centenary, this is where the vital role of repositories such as the UKWA can come into play, providing alternative viewpoints upon the topic of war and ensuring that a wide variety of voices are heard, rather than obscured by the fanfare of national enterprises. In light of the 80th anniversaries of VE and VJ day, the UKWA will curate a special collection documenting events and activities relating to the end of the Second World War, and invite the public to directly submit relevant websites by emailing [email protected].

Through the creation of such a collection, the UKWA will secure an invaluable repository of digital texts, which will not only serve as a preservation of an important historical event, but also as a vital resource for future scholars. Provided will be a unique insight into national forms of commemoration alongside those enacted by individuals and local communities. Digital texts held in the UKWA collections were central to my own research, offering a window into otherwise marginalised and unseen discourses, demonstrating the vast breadth of public responses to and enactments of remembrance in Britain since the end of the First World War. I hope that, moving forwards into this second century of commemoration, the UKWA’s important work will continue, facilitating significant reflection on remembrance for future generations.

Dr Liam Markey is a Research Associate at the University of Liverpool’s Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology. He completed his PhD in collaboration with the British Library in 2023 and is currently working on a British Academy funded project exploring ethical digital public histories of prisoners and the legacy of enslavement in Georgia, USA.

[email protected]

LastPosts.blog

30 April 2025

Just launched - The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies

By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives

The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies Edited By Susan Aasman  Anat Ben-David  Niels Brügger
The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies Edited By Susan Aasman, Anat Ben-David, Niels Brügger

On Monday 28, April 2025, The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies was launched. The book “explores the untapped potential of web archives for researching transnational digital history and communication. It covers cross- border, cross- collection, and cross- institutional examination of web archives on a global scale”.

It is an interdisciplinary collaboration and one of the last outputs from the WARCnet research network, comprising  28 chapters  grouped into five sections. The last chapter in each section is a conversation which multiple authors contributed to by responding to questions set by the editors related to the theme of that section.

Lead editor Susan Aasman stated “The companion contains concrete examples on how to research national web domains through a transnational perspective; provides case studies with grounded explorations of the COVID- 19 crisis as a distinctly transnational event captured by web archives; offers methodological considerations while unpacking techniques and skill sets for conducting transnational web archive research; and critically engages the politics and power dynamics inherent to web archives as institutionalised collections”.

UK Web Archive curators, based at the British Library together with curators at University of Westminster contributed to chapters and conversations in the book. The editors stated that “The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies is an essential read for graduate students and scholars from internet and media studies, cultural studies, history, and digital humanities. It will also appeal to web archiving practitioners, including librarians, web curators, and IT developers”.

To celebrate the launch of the book, Routledge is offering a 20% discount with the code 25AFLY2 on http://www.routledge.com/. This code expires on 30th September 2025 and cannot be used with any other special offers.

25 November 2024

Datasheets for Web Archives Toolkit is now live

By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives

Datasheets for Web Archives Toolkit Banner with authour names and logos
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.

18 September 2024

Creating and Sharing Collection Datasets from the UK Web Archive

By Carlos Lelkes-Rarugal, Assistant Web Archivist

We have data, lots and lots of data, which is of unique importance to researchers, but presents significant challenges for those wanting to interact with it. As our holdings grow by terabytes each month, this creates significant hurdles for the UK Web Archive team who are tasked with organising the data and for researchers who wish to access it. With the scale and complexity of the data, how can one first begin to comprehend what it is that they are dealing with and understand how the collection came into being? 

This challenge is not unique to digital humanities. It is a common issue in any field dealing with vast amounts of data. A recent special report on the skills required by researchers working with web archives was produced by the Web ARChive studies network (WARCnet). This report, based on the Web Archive Research Skills and Tools Survey (WARST), provides valuable insights and can be accessed here: WARCnet Special Report - An overview of Skills, Tools & Knowledge Ecologies in Web Archive Research.

At the UK Web Archive, legal and technical restrictions dictate how we can collect, store and provide access to the data. To enhance researcher engagement, Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives at the British Library, and Emily Maemura, Assistant Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, have been collaborating to explore how and which types of datasets can be published. Their efforts include developing options that would enable users to programmatically examine the metadata of the UK Web Archive collections.

Thematic collections and our metadata

To understand this rich metadata, we first have to examine how it is created and where it is held..

Since 2005 we have used a number of applications, systems, and tools to enable us to curate websites. The most recent being the Annotation and Curation Tool (ACT), which enables authenticated users, mainly curators and archivists, to create metadata that define and describe targeted websites. The ACT tool also serves  to help users build collections around topics and themes, such as the UEFA Women's Euro England 2022. To build collections, ACT users first input basic metadata to build a record around a website, including information such as website URLs, descriptions, titles, and crawl frequency. With this basic ACT record describing a website, additional metadata can be added, for example metadata that is used to assign a website record to a collection. One of the great features of ACT is its extensibility, allowing us, for instance, to create new collections.

These collections, which are based around a theme or an event, give us the ability to highlight archived content. The UK Web Archive holds millions of archived websites, many of which may be unknown or rarely viewed, and so to help showcase a fraction of our holdings, we build these collections which draw on the expertise of both internal and external partners.

Exporting metadata as CSV and JSON files

That’s how we create the metadata, but how is it stored? ACT  is a web application and the metadata created through it is stored in a Postgres relational database, allowing authenticated users to input metadata in accordance to the fields within ACT. As the Assistant Web Archivist, I was given the task to extract the metadata from the database, exporting each selected collection as a CSV and JSON file. To get to that stage, the Curatorial team first had to decide which fields were to be exported. 

The ACT database is quite complex, in that there are 50+ tables which need to be considered. To enable local analysis of the database, a static copy is loaded into a database administration application, in this case, DBeaver. Using the free-to-use tool, I was able to create entity relationship diagrams of the tables and provide an extensive list of fields to the curators so that they could determine which fields are the most appropriate to export.

I then worked on a refined version of the list of fields, running a script for the designated Collection and pulling out specific metadata to be exported. To extract the fields and the metadata into an exportable format, I created an SQL (Structured Query Language) script which can be used to export results in both JSON and/or CSV: 

Select

taxonomy.parent_id as "Higher Level Collection",

collection_target.collection_id as "Collection ID",

taxonomy.name as "Collection or Subsection Name",

CASE

     WHEN collection_target.collection_id = 4278 THEN 'Main Collection'

     ELSE 'Subsection'

END AS "Main Collection or Subsection",

target.created_at as "Date Created",

target.id as"Record ID",

field_url.url as "Primary Seed",

target.title as "Title of Target",

target.description as "Description",

target.language as "Language",

target.license_status as "Licence Status",

target.no_ld_criteria_met as "LD Criteria",

target.organisation_id as "Institution ID",

target.updated_at as "Updated",

target.depth as "Depth",

target.scope as "Scope",

target.ignore_robots_txt as "Robots.txt",

target.crawl_frequency as "Crawl Frequency",

target.crawl_start_date as "Crawl Start Date",

target.crawl_end_date as "Crawl End Date"

From

collection_target

Inner Join target On collection_target.target_id = target.id

Left Join taxonomy On collection_target.collection_id = taxonomy.id

Left Join organisation On target.organisation_id = organisation.id

Inner Join field_url On field_url.target_id = target.id

Where

collection_target.collection_id in (4278, 4279, 4280, 4281, 4282, 4283, 4284) And

(field_url.position Is Null Or field_url.position In (0))

JSON Example
JSON output example for the Women’s Euro Collection

Accessing and using the data

The published metadata is available from the BL Research Repository within the UK Web Archive section, in the folder “UK Web Archive: Data”. Each dataset includes the metadata seed list in both CSV and JSON formats, a data dictionary and a datasheet which gives provenance information about how the dataset was created as well as a data dictionary that defines each of the data fields. The first collections selected for publication were:

  1. Indian Ocean Tsunami December 2004 (January-March 2005) [https://doi.org/10.23636/sgkz-g054]
  2. Blogs (2005 onwards) [https://doi.org/10.23636/ec9m-nj89] 
  3. UEFA Women's Euro England 2022 (June-October 2022) [https://doi.org/10.23636/amm7-4y46] 

31 July 2024

If websites could talk (part 6)

By Ely Nott, Library, Information and Archives Services Apprentice

After another extended break, we return to a conversation between UK domain websites as they try to parse out who among them should be crowned the most extraordinary…

“Where should we start this time?” asked Following the Lights. “Any suggestions?”

“If we’re talking weird and wonderful, clearly we should be considered first.” urged Temporary Temples, cutting off Concorde Memorabilia before they could make a sound.

“We should choose a website with a real grounding in reality.” countered the UK Association of Fossil Hunters.

“So, us, then.” shrugged the Grampian Speleological Group. “Or if not, perhaps the Geocaching Association of Great Britain?”

“We’ve got a bright idea!” said Lightbulb Languages, “Why not pick us?”

“There is no hurry.” soothed the World Poohsticks Champsionships, “We have plenty of time to think, think, think it over.”

“This is all a bit too exciting for us.” sighed the Dull Men’s Club, who was drowned out by the others.

“The title would be right at gnome with us.” said The Home of Gnome, with a little wink and a nudge to the Clown Egg Gallery, who cracked a smile.

“Don’t be so corny.” chided the Corn Exchange Benevolent Society. “Surely the title should go to the website that does the most social good?”

“Then what about Froglife?” piped up the Society of Recorder Players.

“If we’re talking ecology, we’d like to be considered!” the Mushroom enthused, egged on by Moth Dissection UK. “We have both aesthetic and environmental value.”

“Surely, any discussion of aesthetics should prioritise us.” preened Visit Stained Glass, as Old so Kool rolled their eyes.

The back and forth continued, with time ticking on until they eventually concluded that the most extraordinary site of all had to be… Saving Old Seagulls.

Check out previous episodes in this series by Hedley Sutton - Part 1Part 2, Part 3 Part 4 and Part 5

 

27 September 2023

What can you discover and access in the UK Web Archive collection?

UK Web Archiving team, British Library

The UK Web Archive collects and preserves websites from the UK. When we started collecting in 2005, we sought permission from owners to archive their websites. Since 2013, legal deposit regulations have allowed us to automatically collect all websites that we can identify as located in or originating from the UK. 

Since its inception, the UK Web Archive has collected websites using a number of different methods, with an evolving technological structure and under different legal regulations. The result of this means that what can be discovered and accessed is complicated and, therefore, not always easy to explain and understand. In this post we attempt to explain the concepts and terms of what a user will be able to find.

In the table below is a summary of the different search and access options which can be carried out via our main website (www.webarchive.org.uk). The rest of this post will go into more detail about the terms that we have used in this table.

Table of content availble in the UK Web Archive
Table of content availble in the UK Web Archive 

Year

In this table, ‘year’ refers to the year in which we archived a website, or web resource. This might be different to the year in which it was published or made available online. Once you have found an archived website, you can use the calendar feature to view all the instances, or ‘snapshots’ of that page (which might run over many years).  

Legal deposit regulations came into effect in April 2013. Before this date, websites were collected selectively and with the owners’ permissions. This means the amount of content we have from this earlier period is comparatively smaller, but (with some exceptions) is all available openly online. 

From 2013 onwards, we have collected all websites that we can identify as located in or originating from the UK. We do this once per year in a process that we call the ‘annual domain crawl.’

URL look-up

If you know the URL of a website you want to find in the UK Web Archive, you can use the search box at: https://www.webarchive.org.uk. The search box should recognise that you are looking for a URL, and you can also use a drop-down menu to switch between Full Text and URL search.

URL search covers the widest amount of the collection, and our index, which makes the websites searchable, is updated daily.

UKWA Search Bar September 2023
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/

Full text search

Much of the web archive collection has been indexed and allows a free-text search of the content, i.e., any word, phrase, number etc. Note: Given the amount of data in the web archive, the number of results will be very large.

Currently, full text search is available for all our automatically collected content up to 2015, and our curator selected websites up to 2017. 

Access at legal deposit libraries

Unless the website owner gives explicit permission otherwise, legal deposit regulations restrict access to archived websites to the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries. Access is in reading rooms using a library managed computer terminal.

Users will need a reader's pass to access a reading room: check the website of each Library on how to get a reader’s pass.

Online access outside a legal deposit library

We frequently request permission from website owners to allow us to make their archived websites openly accessible through our website. Where permission has been granted, these archived websites can be accessed from our website https://www.webarchive.org.uk/ from any location where you have internet access.

Additionally, we also make archived web content we can identify as having an Open Government Licence openly accessible.

From all the requests we send for open access to websites, we receive permission from approximately 25% of website owners.  However, these websites form a significant overall amount of content available in the archive. This is because they tend to be larger websites and are captured more frequently (daily, weekly, monthly etc.) over many years.

Curator selected websites

Each year, UK Web Archive curators, and other partners who we work with, identify thousands of resources on the web that are related to a particular topic or event, or that require more frequent collection than once per year.

Many of these archived websites form part of our Topics and Themes collections. We have more than 100 of these, covering general elections, sporting events, creative works, and communications between groups with shared interests or experiences. You can browse these collections to find archived web resources relating to these topics and themes. 

Annual Domain Crawl

Separate from selections made by curators, we conduct an annual ‘domain crawl’ to collect as much of the UK Web as possible. This is done under the Non-Print Legal Deposit regulations, with one ‘crawl’ completed each year. This domain crawl is largely automated and looks to archive all .uk, .scot, .wales, .cymru and .london top-level domain websites plus others that have been identified as being UK-based and in scope for collection.

21 September 2023

How YouTube is helping to drive UK Web Archive nominations

By Carlos Lelkes-Rarugal, Assistant Web Archivist, British Library

Screenshot of the UK Web Archive website 'Save a UK website' page.
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/nominate

There currently exists a plethora of digital platforms for all manner of online published works; YouTube itself has become more than just a platform for sharing videos, it has evolved into a platform for individuals and organisations to reach a global audience and convey powerful messages. Recently, a popular content creator on YouTube, Tom Scott, produced a short video helping to outline the purpose of Legal Deposit and by extension, the work being carried out by UKWA.

Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM

Tom Scott’s video, titled "This library has every book ever published", is a concise and authentic glimpse into the work being done by the British Library, one of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries. The video highlighted some of the technology being used that enables preservation at scale, which also highlighted the current efforts in web archiving. Dr Linda Arnold-Stratford (Head of Liaison and Governance for the Legal Deposit Libraries) stated, “The Library collection is around 170 million items. The vast majority of that is Legal Deposit”. Ian Cooke (Head of Contemporary British and Irish Publications) highlighted that with the expansion of Legal Deposit to include born-digital content that “the UK Web Archive has actually become one of the largest parts of the collection. Billions of files, about one and a half terabytes of data”.

At the time of writing, the video has had over 1.4 million views. In addition, as the video continued to gain momentum, something remarkable happened. UKWA started receiving an influx of email nominations from website owners and members of the public. This was unexpected and the volume of nominations that have since come through has been impressive and unprecedented. 

The video has led to increased engagement with the public; with nominations representing an eclectic mix of websites. The comments on the video have been truly positive. We are grateful to Tom for highlighting our work, but we are also thankful and humbled that so many commentators have left encouraging messages, which are a joy to read. The British Library has the largest web archive team of all the Legal Deposit Libraries, but this is still a small team of three curators and four technical experts where we do everything in-house from curation to the technical side. Web archiving is a difficult task but we are hopeful that we can continue to develop the web archive by strengthening our ties to the community by bringing together our collective knowledge.

If you know of a UK website that should be included in the archive, please nominate it here:  https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/info/nominate

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