UK Web Archive blog

By Georgina Bentley, Service Manager Community-based Customer & Cultural Services at Wigan Council

Introduction

The Heritage Fund awarded £500,000 to a programme which is recording the hidden history of women’s football and launched a celebration of the game, its players, and communities in partnership with the UEFA Women’s EUROs.

Alongside this programme, the UK Web Archive is also archiving UK-published websites about the tournament. In this guest blog post, we hear from Georgina Bentley from Wigan Council about their contribution to the collection.

Wigan Council

Wigan Council is the local authority for the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan in the North West of England. The Council have been one of the 10 host cities for the UEFA Women’s EURO 2022, hosting 4 matches at the Leigh Sports Village.

What did you collect for your museum/archive while working on this project?

From the start we wanted to ensure the stories of our local pioneers were central to our collection approach. Supported brilliantly by our archive volunteers, we established a much deeper understanding of how the game had developed in the borough, whilst a call out for local women and girls to share their stories provided us with the source material from which our heritage projects developed.

We translated this material via a series of creative heritage programmes including temporary exhibitions, contemporary collecting events at the fan parties and projects such as A Place At The Table and Around The Match.

The programme has already increased our existing collection with more coming forward. The material collected to date includes a range of oral histories, memorabilia, photographs, news articles, programmes, alongside the output of the creative heritage projects such as the new kit, pin badge and programme developed for the Around The Match.

What kind of online content did you select for the UK Web Archive collection?

With our content selection we wanted to try and capture the breadth of the heritage programme in the borough as it has been an incredibly rich experience to celebrate the amazing stories of our women and girls that play and love the game. This includes:

• Event pages from cultural sites.
• Project websites
• Online newspapers

What websites are important for telling the story of the UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 tournament in your area?

The Visit Wigan web page encapsulate the breadth of opportunity the tournament afforded locally to celebrate elite women’s sport and be inspired to participate.

The Around The Match web page tell the story of 11 women and girls brought together to form a new team. Their individual passions and stories beautifully expressed in a wonderful film on the site that also has details of the contemporary memorabilia created to mark the tournament in the borough. The memorabilia is currently for sale, with 100% of the proceeds going to support the grass roots game locally as a lasting legacy.

The A Place At The Table web page follows the history of women’s football both locally and in context to the national and international game. Each table from the project focuses on a point in history that highlights the place of women in football, as well the parallels with the development of rights for women and wider society at the time.

The archived versions of these web pages can be found in the Cultural Programme subsection of the UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 collection on the UK Web Archive website.

Get Involved

Browse through the UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 and let us know if there is any UK published content that should be added to the collection. Anyone can suggest UK published websites to be included in the UK Web Archive by filling in our nominations form: www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/info/nominate

By Dr Justine Reilly, Strategic Director, Sporting Heritage

Introduction
The Heritage Fund awarded £500,000 to a programme which is recording the hidden history of women’s football and has launched a celebration of the game, its players, and communities in partnership with the UEFA Women’s EUROs.

Alongside this programme, the UK Web Archive is archiving UK-published websites about the tournament. In this guest blog post, we hear from Dr Justine Reilly from Sporting Heritage who supported host city Sheffield, with their contribution to the collection.

Sporting Heritage
Sporting Heritage is a UK wide organisation who work to support the preservation, collection, access, celebration of the sporting past. Whether that be objects and archives, photographs and videos, oral histories or song and chants, our role is to support all those who have a sporting story. We deliver a range of activities and events for example training events, National Sporting Heritage Day, and the Sporting Heritage Awards.

What did you collect for your museum/archive while working on this project?
We supported the host city of Sheffield by developing a number of different programmes including:

• An online exhibition to highlight some key individuals that have been instrumental in the story of women’s football in Sheffield
• A webinar highlighting the current and future development of women’s football in Sheffield. (Delivered on the 21^st July and to be uploaded to our YouTube channel this month)
• Worked with Sheffield Museums and Galleries and delivered workshops for children as well as families during the school holidays
• Podcasts and In Conversations highlighting important women’s football heritage linked to Sheffield and nationally

How did you collect your archive material?
We reached out to local sports clubs and organisations with links to football across Sheffield to inform both our exhibition and our wider activity. This included a social media campaign to draw in voices which have previously been ignored and hidden in the story of women’s football in Sheffield.

We continue to capture new stories via our web pages, and worked closely with partner organisations such as Football Unites, Racism Divides (FURD) and academic researchers Dr Fiona Skillen and Dr Gary James to inform our programming. Our aim was to draw on online content, cross reference historical facts, and hear from lived experience voices which may not have been part of the historical record previously. 

What websites are important for telling the story of the UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 tournament in your area?
The overarching web pages linking to our heritage content around the Women’s Euro in Sheffield:

https://www.sportingheritage.org.uk/content/category/what-we-do/projects/uefa-womens-euros-22

The linked pages hosted by the City of Sheffield:

https://www.welcometosheffield.co.uk/visit/uefa-women-s-euro-2022/

And FURD pages outlining their work on the physical exhibition plinths and supporting activity:

https://furd.org/news/hidden-history-of-sheffield-womens-football-revealed-in-new-exhibitions

The archived versions of these web pages can be found in the Cultural Programme subsection of the UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 collection on the UK Web Archive website.

Get Involved
Browse through the UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 collection and let us know if there is any UK published content that should be added? Anyone can suggest UK published websites to be included in the UK Web Archive by filling in our nomination form: www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/info/nominate

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

Introduction
The Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games are taking place from July 28th to August 8th. There is also an extensive cultural programme running alongside the event till the end of September 2022.

The first Commonwealth Games was held in 1930 and the 2022 event is the twenty second edition of the competition. This is the sixth time that Britain has hosted the Commonwealth Games, Scotland have hosted it three times and including Birmingham 2022, England has hosted it three times. However, this is the second time that Britain has hosted this event since the formation of the UK Web Archive in 2005. 

Sport collecting in the web archive
In late 2017, the UK Web Archive started to formally curate sports websites by establishing three main collections on sport. They are the Sports Collection, Sports: Football and Sports: International Events. The final collection in this series is Sports: International Events, documents major sporting events mostly hosted in the UK. It is in this collection that the Commonwealth Games Glasgow 2014 and the Commonwealth Games Birmingham 2022 collections sit.

You can view the Glasgow 2014 collection here:  https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/22 

You can view the Birmingham 2022 collection here: www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/4228

The Birmingham 2022 collection overview
We’ve broken this collection down into six areas:

• Competitors: Athletes' websites and social media collected during the Games
• Cultural Programme: Any websites and social media accounts related to the cultural programme during the Games
• Organisational Bodies/Venues: UK national Commonwealth Games bodies' sites, local government sites etc.
• Press Media and Comment: News and comment, including the Commonwealth games, interest groups and others
• Sponsors: UK Websites and news articles relating to some of the official sponsors of the Games
• Sports: The Sports subsection has twenty subsections, all governing body websites and club websites related to these sports and the Commonwealth Games will be tagged under their relevant sport

Get involved 
The UK Web Archive works across the six UK legal Deposit Libraries and with other external partners to try and bridge gaps in our subject expertise. But we can’t curate the whole of the UK web on our own, we need your help to ensure that information, discussions and creative output related to the Commonwealth Games Birmingham 2022 are preserved for future generations.

Anyone can suggest UK published websites to be included in the UK Web Archive by filling in our nomination form.

By Rosita Murchan, Web Archivist, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI)

Thanks to the Deputy Keeper of the Records, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Women’s Football Association for the photo

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) is the official archive of Northern Ireland and is situated in the historic Titanic Quarter in Belfast. PRONI was established by the Public Records Act (Northern Ireland) in 1923 which means in June next year we look forward to celebrating our centenary. PRONI has been collecting websites for over ten years, focusing on Government departments, local councils and websites deemed historically or culturally important to Northern Ireland. Over the years our collection has grown in both size and scope and we now capture one terabyte of data per year. PRONI does not have legal deposit status, so working with the UK Web Archive enables us to widen the scope of our collections, and ensure that other relevant content is captured.

PRONI has a rich history of celebrating women in sport having previously curated ‘A Level Playing field – Women in sport’ an exhibition from the archives held by PRONI. With images from the late nineteenth century onwards, this exhibition reminds us that women actually have a long history of participation in a wide range of sporting activities. PRONI also holds the papers of the Northern Ireland Women’s Football Association which includes official minutes and documents, as well as scrapbooks, programmes, newspaper clippings and other ephemera (PRONI Reference: D4633).

We are delighted to be working in partnership once again with the British Library and adding a Northern Irish perspective to their UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 collection.

The Northern Ireland team has defied the odds to book their place in this summer’s tournament, and PRONI’s collaboration with the British Library will enable us to capture web content documenting the progress of the players who are set to make history for Northern Ireland this summer.

We plan to select as much of the news and media coverage as we can, capturing the local views, hype and excitement of Northern Ireland’s historic qualification to the Euros as well as content from Northern Ireland women’s official home page within the IFA (NI Women's Football) detailing all fixtures, news, team profiles and updates throughout the tournament. We will also include social media content about the tournament, twitter feeds of organisations and team members, and general social media coverage of the competition.

In recent years, PRONI has developed a number of creative and digital engagement projects that put the public at the heart of archives, making archives more welcoming and inclusive. We plan to use our social media channels to put out a call for nominations for sites from PRONI followers but anyone can suggest UK published websites to be included in the UK Web Archive by filling in our nominations form: www.webarchive.org.uk/nominate

By Eilidh MacGlone (National Library of Scotland) and Aled Betts (National Library of Wales) 

The UEFA Women's Euro 2022 competition is taking place across England from July 6 to July 31, 2022. We are collecting websites about the 2022 UEFA Women’s EURO from around the UK.

You can view the UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 collection here:  

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

Although Scotland and Wales didn’t qualify for this year's tournament, football fans in both countries will be getting involved in the celebrations. In this blog post we hear about what content the National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Wales have added to the UK Web Archive collection. 

National Library of Scotland 
As Scotland supporters are aware, we won’t be competing in this year’s Euros (ah, the 95th minute!). Yet, our collecting has captured a valiant qualifying effort, through news sites and the national team's social media. Caroline Weir is one player keeping an eye on the competition, writing an online column with some collegiate support for old Man City teammates. Also evident is that the writing we are collecting describes a sport reaching larger audiences.

Teams are competing in national stadiums – a departure from the smaller arenas we found collecting the last Women’s World Cup. It can be seen in the team taking advantage of this to share a broad message with more football fans. Captain Rachel Corsie giving an example, of wearing pride colours on her captain’s armband at Scotland’s game with Hungary. The national team are now looking to plans for its second World Cup next year, players are looking to a new Scottish Women's Premier League, starting in August. We will continue to preserve Scottish women's football, preserving growing interest in the sport.

National Library of Wales 
Wales were agonisingly close on qualifying for UEFA Women's Euro England 2022, which would have been a historic moment as would have meant Wales reaching their first ever major Tournament. Northern Ireland narrowly secured the play-off place at the expense of Wales as their head-to-head away goal count was superior! As the Euros are being held in England, National Library of Wales focus will be archiving sites looking at the competition from a Welsh perspective.

Women’s Football in Wales has never been stronger as the National team maintain their push for qualification for next year’s World Cup and the huge rise in domestic clubs over the last 20 years providing opportunities to so many. This is reflected by the many websites and twitter feeds that have been archived by the National Library of Wales. For instance, we archive the FAW website and Twitter account, the Twitter feeds of our most famous players, archive Premier clubs websites as well as delving into grassroots football by archiving Domestic League websites and we will look at adding many more sites to the rich collection that we already have.

Get involved with preserving women’s football online with the UK Web Archive
The UK Web Archive works across the six UK legal Deposit Libraries and with other external partners to try and bridge gaps in our subject expertise. But we can’t curate the whole of the UK web on our own, we need your help to ensure that information, discussions and creative output related to the UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 are preserved for future generations. Anyone can suggest UK published websites to be included in the UK Web Archive by filling in our nomination form.

By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives, British Library

The UEFA Women's Euro 2022 competition is taking place across England from July 6 to July 31, 2022. We are collecting websites about the 2022 UEFA Women’s EURO from around the UK. You can view the collection here:  

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

This blog post runs through some examples of the type of content you might like to nominate to the collection. 

We archive as much openly available online content that we can identify as being published in the UK. Archiving is carried out through a mix of automated processes such as an annual domain crawl or through manual selection by the UK Web Archive teams, as well as the public nomination form.

UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022
For the UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022 we want content that specifically refers to the tournament. Some websites might only have a subsection or even just one page dedicated to the tournament so you can nominate that specific URL. 

We add the following type of web content to the collection:

1. Full website
2. Subsection of a website
3. Individual page from a website
4. Event page
5. Twitter accounts

Unfortunately due to technical challenges, the only social media content we can successfully archive is Twitter. If you know of any high-profile Twitter accounts -  that aren’t personal accounts of ordinary people - then please nominate them. 

Examples of some website content we have added so far include:

Full website
Have you seen any new websites set up just for the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 tournament? Most websites will, at most, just have a dedicated subsection or page for the tournament. Some websites such as the official sponsor, Visa, highlight the tournament on their home page in the run-up to and during the tournament. This is why we have added the whole website to the collection, as it is easy for the user to navigate from the home page of the archived website during the tournament to the dedicated section for the tournament. 

Subsection of a website
The FA website has a subsection dedicated to UEFA Women’s Euro 2022. The earliest captures of this subsection are from July 2020 which you can view here:

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20200726095218/http://www.thefa.com/competitions/uefa-womens-euro-2022 

Link to archived website: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20200726095218/http://www.thefa.com/competitions/uefa-womens-euro-2022 

Individual page from a website
In some cases there is just one page on a website relevant to the collection subject. When thinking about women’s football, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) doesn’t always come top of the list of potential websites. However, they have partnered with the FA to ‘engage fans in a range of musical opportunities and public events celebrating the history, ethos and future of women’s football’. What other websites have you seen that have posted an article about the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 tournament? 

You can listen back to the archived versions of the anthems on the RPO website here: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20220621111257/https://www.rpo.co.uk/rpo-resound/womens-euro-anthem 

Event pages:
There are lots of events going on around the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022, these range from official events, fan-led events or venues organising their own events such as talks, book launches or watch parties for the matches. Eventbrite is one of the most popular platforms for ticketing these events, but have you seen any other platforms or websites?

A search on Eventbrite for Euro 2022 in the United Kingdom on the day of writing comes back with 500 pages. 

Twitter accounts:
Archived copies of Twitter accounts are only accessible through a reading room, but you can view what we have selected here: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/4284

We have already added the Twitter accounts of the players for England, Northern Ireland and other players based in the UK. However, we may have missed some, so please let us know through the nomination form.

Get involved 
Anyone can suggest UK published websites to be included in the UK Web Archive by filling in our nomination form.

By Jason Webber, Web Archive Engagement Manager, British Library

The British Library is currently running the wonderful ‘Breaking the News’ exhibition. If you’ve not seen it yet, make sure you check it out. It is open until Sun 21 Aug 2022. The exhibition explores how the News has impacted and influenced our society. This exploration includes modern digital forms of news, much of which are contained in the UK Web Archive (UKWA).

The ‘News’ collection in UKWA contains over 2700 news sites that we archive. The scope ranges from major national news outlets - BBC, Guardian, Daily Mail etc. as well as many local and even hyper-local news websites. The collection includes one newspaper, The Independent, that ceased being a print paper to become exclusively a digital one.

The majority of these archived news sites and twitter accounts can only be viewed in reading rooms of UK Legal Deposit Libraries. Many, however, are openly available to view from home, lets see some examples:

Local news
In addition to major national news outlets we collect thousands of local and hyper-local news websites. Many towns, suburbs and villages maintain a local news website and we do our best to archive them.

Brixton blog

Bristol cable

Cranfield and Marston Vale Chronicle 

International
Whilst the focus of the our collection is for UK based news, we do also collect some international or overseas publications. Tristan da Cunha, one of the remotest places on earth maintains a news website for its residents.
Irish news - TheJournal.ie

Tristan da Cunha News 

About journalism
As well as news outlets aimed at us the public, we also collect websites for journalists themselves.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Media helping media

You can discover everything we have collected in the News collection via our website.

If you know of a UK news website (this might be about your local area), nominate it to the UK Web Archive.

By Andrea Deri, Cataloguer, Lead Curator of UK Web Archive Climate Change Collection; Nicola Bingham, Lead Curator, Web Archives; Eilidh MacGlone, Web Archivist; Trevor Thomson, General Collections Assistant (Collection Development) National Library of Scotland

What public climate and sustainability related UK websites would you preserve for future research?

What public UK websites tell the story of climate change actions in your areas of living, travelling, working, study and passions?

Nominate these websites to the UK Web Archive Climate Change Collection. You can nominate as many websites or webpages as you feel are relevant.

Photo by '_Marion'

About the Climate Change Collection
The UK Web Archive Climate Change Collection is not only an archive of past digital content preserved for future research. It is also a live, dynamic, growing resource for decisions, research and learning today.  

Much of the debate around climate change is taking place on the Web and is, therefore, highly ephemeral, meaning it is important to capture it now, in real time. The UK Web Archive Climate Change collection does just that: captures climate related public UK websites and archives them regularly according to the frequency of updates on the website. 

What is the UK Web Archive?
The UK Web Archive (UKWA) is a collaboration of the six UK legal deposit libraries working together to preserve websites for future generations. The Climate Change collection is one of over hundred curated collections of the UK Web Archive. Given the multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary nature of the climate crisis, researchers may also find several other UKWA collections relevant for studying climate change, for example, the News Sites, Science Collection, British Countryside, Energy, Local History Societies, District Councils, Political Action and Communication, Brexit, among others.  

While all the UK legal deposit libraries contribute subject expertise to the Climate Change collection’s development, to make it more representative we solicit nominations as widely as possible. To this end we have developed a simple form, which allows anyone to nominate public websites or web pages published in the UK. If you would like to nominate a website for the UK Web Archive Climate Change collection add the title, URL and brief description of the website or webpage. 

If you would like us to acknowledge your nomination, enter  your name and email address.

What can UKWA archive?
Before you nominate, you might want to check your nomination for scope and duplication. The UK Web Archive cannot archive sound and video platforms in which the audio and video content dominate. Websites that require personal log-in details, for example Facebook sites, or private intranets, emails, personal data on social networking sites or websites only allowable to restricted groups. 

What happens to my nomination?
All nominations are checked manually by a curator. If the website meets the requirements of non-print legal deposit, it is added to the collection by library staff without any prejudice regarding content. We want to make the climate change collection representative of diverse perspectives. The annotation process includes assigning broad subject labels, crawl frequency (the frequency of archiving), and a licencing request for making historical pages public. While all UKWA Climate Change collection titles are listed online, archived versions of the websites can be accessed only in legal deposit libraries’ reading rooms unless licenced.  

 Why is this collection important?
The UKWA Climate Change collection serves several functions, three being particularly important: 

1. Supports research - Supports research related to climate change issues
2. Raises awareness & curiosity - Makes readers aware of and curious about the diversity of climate change impacts, mitigation and adaptation activities across scale
3. Engages in action - Inspires readers to take action including nominating websites for future preservation and by doing so contributing to the knowledge base of climate change

By inviting nominations, the UKWA Climate Change collection draws on a citizen science approach, in other words, engages members of the public in academic research and developing the collection. The integration of library science and citizen science acknowledges the complementary values of diverse forms of knowledge, including diverse forms of local knowledge. With their nominations contributors can diversify existing sub-collections and initiate the creation of new sub-collections. For example, a new sub-collection has just recently been suggested dedicated to climate change & sustainability strategies of UK galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM sector).  

History of the Collection
The collection was established when The Paris Agreement was negotiated at the UNFCCC COP21, in 2015. The acceleration of the climate crises, the exponential growth of digital climate content publishing and the demand for innovations that can be inspired by a diversity of knowledge, local, practical, technical and academic, called for an upgrade. The Climate Change collection is an important source of knowledge both in preparation for the UNFCCC COP26 conference in Glasgow. 

Websites and webpages archived over time tell the stories how individuals and organisations have been making sense of and responding to the climate crises. We encourage you to nominate the public websites that tell the stories of your engagement with the changing climate and websites you want to preserve for future generations. 

Further recommended sources 

• Watch this 2 min video about the collection 
• UK Government Web Archive (National Archives)
• Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Climate Change Collection (2019)