UK Web Archive blog

Information from the team at the UK Web Archive, the Library's premier resource of archived UK websites

The UK Web Archive, the Library's premier resource of archived UK websites

17 posts categorized "Current Affairs"

07 June 2021

Curating the UKWA LGBTQ+ Lives Online collection

By Ash Green and Steven Dryden - LGBTQ+ Lives Online lead curators

The LGBTQ+ Lives Online collection has been live now for almost a year. This has given us the time to gain a better understanding of the content in it, and also how people are interacting with the collection. Based on this, we wanted to consider some of the challenges around structuring, tagging and representing sites within it.

Sub-Collections & Subject tagging

When the collection was set up, one of the tasks that needed to be undertaken was defining the structure of the sub-collections. At this stage they are organised as follows:

  • Activism/Pride
  • Arts, Literature, Music & Culture
  • Business/Commerce
  • Education
  • History
  • Medicine and Community
  • Policy and Legislative Change
  • Religion
  • Social Organisations
  • Sport

We defined the sub-collections based on what we thought would be added to the collection, without actually knowing what the majority of that content might be. As more sites have been added we can see that some sub-collections work well and others not so well. We are getting a sense of which sub-collections might need to be revisited.

One sub-collection that at this stage requires more consideration in terms of whether it should be changed or split, is Medicine & Community. When we set this up, it felt like a logical pairing – both aspects of the sub-collection are about well-being, with one indicating it’s about medical support, and the other about wellness achieved through peer support. But now, as we add more sites to this sub-collection, the terminology doesn’t feel quite right. This is especially true when sites focused more on well-being, emotional support and guidance, such as Spectra and Outline Surrey are included in the sub-collection. Possibly a more appropriate sub-collection name would be Health & Community, which would still allow the inclusion of medical and community wellness, but under a clearer umbrella.

No homophobia, no violence t-shirt

When the collection was set up, Retirement also featured as a sub-collection. We eventually removed this before go-live. Not because it wasn’t relevant, but because there was insufficient online content within the collection to justify including it at this stage. That said, that may change over time and an increase in sites focusing on both retirement and older LGBTQ+ people’s lives may result in us re-instating it or a similar sub-collection. Similarly, other themes might rise out of existing sites in the collection that would require new sub-collections to be added, or even new subjects to be included. Part of the key purpose of the collection is to not only archive appropriate web sites, but to also make them findable via the sub-collections.

As well as adding sites to sub-collections within the LGBTQ+ Lives Online collection, they can also be assigned to other collections and sub-collections. For example, Graces Cricket Club (a gay cricket club) appear in both the LGBTQ+ Lives Online / Sport sub-collection and the separate Sport: Football collection. In cases like this, there’s no question that it’s perfectly appropriate to include this site in both subject collections. However, in some instances, LGBTQ+ sites have also been previously included in inappropriate sub-collections. For example, one site in the collection had previously been assigned to Medicine and Health / Conditions & Diseases sub-collection before the LGBTQ+ Lives

Online project began. This incorrectly implied that being an LGBTQ+ person was either a “condition” or a “disease”. This has been corrected, but it highlights that we also need to be aware that choosing which collection or sub-collection we add a site to has implications about how a curator perceives that site, and the negative bias we may in turn present to collection users by including a site in an inappropriate sub-collection.

Content Warnings
Another area we are considering is content warnings. When we recently ran an online session about the collection, we were asked if any content warnings were included in the descriptions of sites tagged within the collection. Another person also expressed concern about the inclusion of sites within the LGBTQ+ Lives Online collection that were negative or hostile towards members of the LGBTQ+ community. Though these sites are included, they do not provide content warnings about their harmful and negative perspectives or context about their inclusion. Again, this is a valid comment, and content warnings would help identify that users were about to enter a site whose perspectives might be problematic or triggering.

Keyboard - caution

You may also be wondering why sites such as the ones that are negative or hostile towards members of the LGBTQ+ community are included in the collection? It goes back to the purpose of this project, which is to archive UK sites that reflect UK LGBTQ+ lives and experiences. This includes positive, neutral and negative sites if relevant. For example, we include at least one site in the collection that questions the validity of trans and gender non-conforming people as apart of the LGBTQ+ community. If we didn’t include this site, it would not give a balanced picture of trans people’s experience, as it would miss out on a key factor that has had a huge impact on many trans lives over the past few years. As such, even though we do not agree with questioning the validity of trans and gender non-

conforming people, those sites are valid to LGBTQ+ research and discussion. But it’s not just sites like these that we would consider including a content warning against. Any sites highlighting LGBTQ+ phobic or hate content may also be included.

Content warnings are not something we’ve considered before, and at present, the cataloguing rules for the UK Web Archive collection don’t have capacity for the inclusion of content warnings. However, following on from these conversations, it is something we need to address, along with highlighting that including content within the collection does not necessarily mean that the curators agree with the opinions in those sites.

The structure of the sub-collections and content warnings are areas that we want to address as soon as we can, and it is something we would like to discuss with the wider LGBTQ+ community. How we achieve that is yet to be decided, but we are always open to suggestions.

In the mean-time, don’t forget that you can explore the LGBTQ+ Lives Online UK Web Archive collection.

You can also nominate sites for inclusion in the collection.

 

25 November 2020

LGBTQ+ Lives Online Web Archive Collection

By Steven Dryden, British Library LGBTQ+ Staff Network & Ash Green CILIP LGBTQ+ Network

As you’ll have read on this blog, the collaboration with UK Web Archive (UKWA), British Library and CILIP LGBTQ+ Network to develop LGBTQ+ content within the UK Web Archive was launched during summer 2020.

Rainbow tapestry

LGBTQ+ content was already part of the UK Web Archive before the collaboration began, with many sites in other collections overlapping LGBTQ+ themes. For example, Black and Asian Britain (blackgayblog.com), Gender Equality (Beyond the Binary), Sport (Graces Cricket Club). And some sites cut across many collections, highlighting the intersectional nature of the UK Web Archive. For example, Gal-Dem features in the News Sites; Zines and Fanzines; Black and Asian Britain; Gender Equality; Women's Issues; Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Rights collections, as well as LGBTQ+ Lives Online. LGBTQ+ Lives Online, much like the lived experience of the LGBTQ+ does not sit in isolation, disconnected from other aspects of UK offline and online life. LGBTQ+ people play a part in all aspects of the UK community, and are not solely defined by their gender or sexual orientation.

This UK Web Archive collection doesn’t stand in isolation either, it enriches the scope of work already begun at The British Library.LGBTQ Histories aims to explore the experiences and stories encountered in the collections, posing questions about the lived experience of LGBTQ+ people throughout history.The LGBTQ+ Lives Online collection of the UK Web Archive plays a part in CILIP LGBTQ+ Network’s ambition to raise the profile of LGBTQ+ people, support the development of LGBTQ+ information resources and the work of LGBTQ+ Library, information and knowledge workers.

LGBTQ+ Lives Online Collection

UKWA 'ACT' tool

The collection currently contains over 400 sites and web pages in the main collection, with more of these being added to sub-collections every week. Many of the sites were already in the UKWA before the collaboration began, but were not linked to sub-collections. We are still at the stage where we are developing the structure of sub-collections but our initial indexes cover:

Since the launch of this collaborative project, we have been focused on a number of areas to both develop the project and to preserve sites within the collection. This includes:

  • Identifying sites already in the UK Web Archive to be added to the LGBTQ+ Lives Online sub-collections.
  • Identifying new sites not already in the UKWA to be included in the collection.
  • Spreading the word about the project as widely as possible via blog posts and articles such as this; social media; emails targeting specific LGBTQ+, library, and broader diversity organisations and networks.

You can browse through the collection here, and nominate a UK published site or webpage with a focus on LGBTQ+ lives to be included in the collection via: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/info/nominate. We would especially like to see more nominations that reflect the multicultural nature of UK LGBTQ+ communities and the many diaspora communities based here, including UK sites written in languages other than English.

Though it can often be challenging for us to archive social media accounts, we are able to collect LGBTQ+ Twitter accounts. We have experimented with other methods of archiving social media but this is on a selective basis, but we would welcome nominations and projects that might address these challenges and how they might impact on archiving LGBTQ+ experience in the UK,

How can you access these archived websites?

UKWA search results page

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 Library and Trinity College Dublin Library.  

Some of the websites in UKWA have already had permission granted, these include Out Stories Bristol, Trans Ageing and Care, Bi Cymru/Wales and Queer Zine Library. As the content of UKWA has mixed access, the message ‘Viewable only on Library premises’ will appear under the title of the website if you need to visit a Legal Deposit Library to view content. If there is no message underneath then the archived version of the website should be available on your personal device.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the reading rooms were closed for a number of weeks but are starting to reopen. This blog post gives an overview of opening hours and how to book a visit at the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries:

https://blogs.bl.uk/webarchive/2020/09/ukwa-available-in-reading-rooms-again.html 

Previous blog posts about the project can be viewed via the following links.

LGBTQ+ Lives Online project introduction

LGBTQ+ Lives Online: Introducing the Lead Curators

 

28 October 2020

PRONI Web Archive: A Collaborative Approach

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

PRONI Web Archive homepage
Screenshot of the PRONI Web Archive homepage

 

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) Web Archive has been building its collection of websites for almost ten years, focusing initially on capturing the websites of our Government departments and local councils but also websites deemed historically or culturally important to Northern Ireland.

Our collection has grown in both size and scope and we now have over 240 captured sites that range from Instagram and twitter feeds to local history group pages to significant inquest sites with one terabyte of data being captured each year.

Unlike the rest of UK where legal deposit libraries are entitled to copy published material from the internet under the 2013 Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations (NPLD),  PRONI has no legal deposit status and rather works on a permissions based approach where we write to website owners informing them of our intention to archive their website and then operate on a ‘silence is consent’ approach crawling a site anyway and taking down websites should the owner request it. 

In an attempt to continue to expand our collection we have been very lucky to have been invited to collaborate with the UK Web Archive team based at the British Library on some of their projects in the last year and have added a Northern Ireland perspective on the topics of Brexit and the General Election 2019 and more recently a NI Covid-19 viewpoint.

Part and parcel of this collaboration included us getting access to and being able to use and add to the UK Web Archive ACT Web Archiving tool. For me this was a great opportunity to see and use another web archiving tool, especially a custom piece of software for an institution as reputable as the British Library and it has been a fantastic opportunity for us to archive sites that would normally be outside our remit, as a result we have been able to add to further research for Northern Ireland.

We really hope to continue this partnership with the British library going forward, not only as a method of increasing the amount of NI archived sites but also as a way to continue to improve and learn from their expertise.

You can watch Rosita Murchan’s presentation on the EWA YouTube Channel.

 

29 July 2020

15 Years of UKWA - Looking back at our first collections

By Jason Webber, Web Archive Engagement Manager, The British Library

 

This blog follows on from ‘15 Years of the UK Web Archive - The Early Years’.

2020 marks fifteen years since  the UK Web Archive (UKWA) started archiving UK published  websites. In this blog I’ll be looking at the first curated collections that were made and some of the differences in web archiving from then until now.

In 2005, when the British Library (as part of the UK Web Archive Consortium (UKWAC)) started collecting websites, the techniques and procedures were still being pioneered. It was identified early on that grouping captured websites into collections would be useful for future researchers. Read about a few of our first.

 

Indian Ocean Tsunami 

On Boxing day 2004, a huge earthquake and subsequent Tsunami caused severe destruction and loss of life in many areas around the Indian Ocean. Almost immediately afterwards a huge international relief effort was underway that included several UK based efforts. This catastrophic event happened just at the point that UKWAC started archiving websites and curators quickly decided that this deserved to be reflected in the archive . Selection and archiving took place between January and March 2005. It resulted in a small collection of websites representing news articles, charities and the response from travel companies.

This first collection demonstrated the ability of web archives to collect digital material around key events as they happened. Indian Ocean Tsunami collection

 

Collection_2435_indianoceantsunami
Indian Ocean

 

UK General Election 2005
In addition to ‘rapid response’ events, UKWA aims to collect important national events such as elections. 2005 was a period before fixed term elections and the curation team had only a matter of weeks to organise a plan between the government calling the election and it taking place. The way that candidates promoted themselves was different in 2005 than they are now. Only some had their own websites, Facebook was not yet widespread and Twitter didn’t yet exist. It is a fascinating contrast between the 2005 UK General Election and the last one in 2019 both in number (148 v 2,234) and in the range and breadth of the collection.

 

View of Westminster Bridge and the Palace of Westminster from the opposite side if the River Thames

 

Blogs
We all now know what a blog is, right? In 2005 though, it was a relatively new way for people to self publish on the web. It was so new that when the collection was first made we felt the need to explain what one was and that it was a shortening of ‘web log’.

Since then, of course, blogs have been a widespread form of self expression and creativity. They cover every imaginable subject from politics to satire, local history to personal history and many more. This collection contains over 1000 blogs, many of which are no longer available. See what you can find in the Blogs collection.

 

Image of word tiles spelling the word blog

 

Selective curation

Since 2013, thanks to the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations, the UK Web Archive is able to archive any UK published website. Prior to 2013, however, curators had to obtain permission from the website owner before any archiving  could take place. UKWA has always tried to collect a representative sample of the UK web which can include a very wide range of topics and opinions. We have always tried to be clear that selection is not endorsement, either of views or of quality. Each item in the collection is rich in its own way.

 

100+ curated collections and counting

Since these first collections in 2005, the number of collections has grown to over 100.  See all of our curated collections here.

We have continued to respond to important events with ‘rapid response’ collections such as the Zika Virus outbreak of 2016-2017 and the death of Margaret Thatcher in 2013. We have also continued to collect political events such as General elections, Scottish and Welsh Parliamentary elections and several key referendums such as the EU referendum. We also try to represent all parts of the UK from the FTSE100 to the lives and hobbies of the nation in ‘Online enthusiasts’.

 

29 May 2020

Using Webrecorder to archive UK political party leaders' social media after the UK General Election 2019

This blog post is is by Nicola Bingham, Helena Byrne, Carlos Lelkes-Rarugal and Giulia Carla Rossi

Introduction to Webrecorder

The UK Web Archive aims to capture the whole of the UK web space at least once a year, and targeted websites at more frequent intervals. We conduct this activity under the auspices of the Legal Deposit Regulations 2013 which enable us to capture, preserve and make accessible the UK Web for the benefit of researchers now and in the future.

Along with many cultural and heritage institutions that perform at-scale web archiving, we use Heritrix 3, the state of the art crawler developed by the Internet Archive and maintained and improved by an international community of web archiving technologists.

Heritrix copes very well with large scale, bulk crawling but is not optimised for high fidelity crawling of dynamic content, and in particular does not archive social media content very well.

Researchers are increasingly turning their attention to social media as a significant witness to our times, therefore we have a requirement to capture this content, in certain circumstances and in line with our collection development policy. Usually this will be around public events such as General Elections where much of the campaigning over recent years has been played out online and increasingly on social media in particular. 

For this reason we have looked at alternative web archiving tools such as Webrecorder to complement our existing toolset. 

Webrecorder was developed by Ilya Kreymer under the auspices of Rhizome (a non-profit organisation based in New York which commissions, presents and preserves digital art), under its digital preservation program. It offers a browser based version, which offers free accounts up to 5GB storage and a Desktop App

Webrecorder was already well known to us at the UK Web Archive although we had not used it until recently. It is a web archiving service which creates an interactive copy of web pages that the user explores in their browser including content revealed by interactions such as playing video and audio, scrolling, clicking buttons etc. This is a much more sophisticated method of acquisition than that used by Hertrix which essentially only follows HTML links and doesn’t handle dynamic content very well. 


What we planned to do

The UK General Election Campaign ran from the 6th of November 2019 when Parliament was dissolved, until polling day on the 12th of December 2019. On the 13th of December 2019 the UK Web Archive team, based at the British Library attempted to archive various social media accounts of the main political party leaders. Seventeen political leaders from the four home nations were identified and a selection of three social media accounts were targeted: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Not all leaders have accounts on all three platforms, but in total forty four social media accounts were archived. These accounts are identified in the table below by an X. 

List of UK political political part leaders' social media accounts archived
Image credit: Carlos Lelkes-Rarugal

 

 

How we did it

On the 13th of December, 2019 we ran the Webrecorder Desktop App across twelve office PCs. Many were running the Webrecorder Autopilot function over the accounts, but we had mixed success, in that not all accounts captured the same amount of data. As the Autopilot functionality didn’t work well on all accounts, a combination of automated and manual capture processes were used where necessary. It took the team a lot longer than expected to archive the accounts therefore some were archived on a range of dates the following week.    

 

Large political party’s vs smaller party’s social media accounts

The two largest political party leaders, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson, have many more social media followers than the other home nations party leaders. This meant that it was more difficult to get a comprehensive capture of Corbyn and Johnson’s Twitter accounts than, for example, Arlene Foster’s. The more popular Twitter accounts took many hours to crawl; Corbyn’s took almost ten hours to archive thirteen day’s worth of Tweets (which only took us up to 1st December). 

 

Technical Issues

We experienced several technical issues with crawling, mainly concerned with issues around  IP addresses, the app crashing, and Autopilot working on some computers and not others. It was hard to get the app restarted after it crashed, so some time was lost when this happened. Different computers with the same specs ran differently. The Autopilot capture for Jeremy Corbyn’s and Boris Johnson’s Twitter accounts were started at the same time but Corbyn’s ran uninterrupted while Johnson’s crashed when it reached 475 MB. Although Corbyn’s account was crawled for nearly ten hours it only collected 93 MB of data. In contrast, Nigel Farage’s Twitter page was crawled for over four hours and only produced 506 MB. It is important to check the size of crawled data, as the hours the Webrecorder Desktop App is running on Autopilot does not necessarily translate into a high fidelity crawl. 

 

Added complications when using multiple devices with the same user profile:

Complications arose mainly from the auditing and collating of WARC files; performing QA and keeping track of which jobs were successful and those that were not. 

Initially, all participants in this project had planned to use their own work PC or work laptop and a local desktop installation of Webrecorder. However, an hour or so into the process(early in the day), it soon became apparent that there would not be enough time to archive all of the social media accounts within our time frame, given the volume of social media accounts and the unanticipated time it would take to archive each one. For example, it took one instance of a desktop Webrecorder application almost ten hours to archive Jeremy Corbyn’s Twitter account (only able to capture Tweets up to a month prior to the day of archiving).

It was then decided that we could potentially, and experimentally, run multiple parallel Webrecorder applications across a number of office desktop PCs; PCs that were free and available for us to use. This was possible because of the IT Architecture in place, allowing users to log into any office machine with the correct credentials and making their personal desktop load up along with all their files and user settings, regardless of the PC they log into. 

The British Library’s IT system, which incorporates a lot of the Windows ecosystem, gives each user their own dedicated central work directory where they are given a virtual hard drive and  their own storage space for all their documents and any other work related files. This allowed one user to be logged into several office PCs at the same time and therefore run a separate desktop Webrecorder application running on each machine. This was indeed very helpful as it allowed each machine to focus on one particular social media account, which in many cases took hours to archive. 

Having multiple Webrecorder jobs greatly increased our capacity to archive by removing the previous bottleneck, that was, one webrecorder job per user. Instead, this was increased to several webrecorder jobs per user.

Work flow of gathering WARC files from Webrecorder
Image credit: Carlos Lelkes-Rarugal

 

 

Having multiple Webrecorder jobs added complications down the line, not necessarily impacting the archiving process, but rather, complicating the auditing and collating of WARC files. When a user had several Webrecorder jobs running concurrently, each job would still be downloading to the same user work directory (the user’s virtual hard drive). So if a user had many parallel jobs running, this would create multiple WARC files in the same folder (but with different names, so no clashes), WARC files being produced by the different desktop PC that the user had logged in to. This was quite an elaborate setup because once a job had completed, the entire contents of the Webrecrder folder (where the WARCs were stored) was copied to a USB so that an initial Quality Assurance (QA) could be performed on the completed job on a more capable laptop. The difficulty was in finding the WARC file that corresponded to the completed job, which was somewhat convoluted as there would have been multiple WARC files with this type of file-naming convention:

 “rec-20191213100335021576-DESKTOP-AOCGH38-7B5SEXKS.warc.gz”. 

As you can imagine, taking a copy of Webrecorder’s folder contents not only has the completed job, but also the instances of other WARC files from other incomplete jobs. Coupled with multiple jobs per PC, and multiple PCs per user; keeping track of what had completed and which WARCs were either corrupted or not up to standard, was quite demanding. 

 


Review of the data collected 

File size of data collected from UK political party leaders' social media accounts
Image credit: Carlos Lelkes-Rarugal

 

How to access this data

The archived social media accounts can be accessed through the UK General Election 2019 collection in a UK Legal Deposit Library Reading Room. The UK Legal Deposit Libraries are the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Dublin Library.  

The 2019 collection is part of a time series of UK General Elections dating from 2005. They can be accessed over the Internet on the Topics and Themes page of the UK Web Archive website. All the party leaders' social media accounts are tagged into the subsection UK Party Leaders Social Media Accounts (access to individual websites depends on whether we have an additional permission to allow ‘open’ access). More information about what is included in the UK General Election 2019 collection is available through the UK Web Archive blog

 

Conclusion


Overall, undertaking this experiment was an interesting experience for our small team of British Library Web Archive Curators. Many valuable lessons were learnt on how best to utilise Webrecorder in our current practice. The major takeaway was that it was a lot more time consuming than we expected. Instead of taking up one working day, it took nearly a whole week to archive our targeted social media accounts with Webrecorder. Our usual practise is to archive social media accounts with the Heritrix crawler, which works reasonably well with Twitter but is less suited to capturing other platforms. For a long time, we were unable to capture any Facebook content with Heritrix, mainly due to the platform’s publishing model, however the way the platform is published has changed recently allowing us limited success. Archiving social media will always remain challenging for the UK Web Archive, for myriad technical, ethical and legal reasons. The sheer scale of the UK’s social media output is too large for us to capture adequately (and indeed, this may not even be desirable) and certainly too large a task for us to tackle with manual, high fidelity tools such as Webrecorder. However, our recent experience during the 2019 UK General Election has convinced us that using Webrecorder to capture significant events is a worthwhile exercise, as long as we target selected, in scope accounts on a case by case basis. 

 

22 September 2016

Web Archiving Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games

‘For the Olympics, the whole world is captivated, turns on its television and supports their country’

Introduction
The Olympic and Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil may be over but it will be some time before they are forgotten about in the press and social media. Web archives play a vital role in preserving the narratives that have come out of these Games. The Content Development Group (CDG) at the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) has been archiving both the Winter and Summer Games since 2010 and the Rio 2016 Collection will be available in October 2016.

Rio-world-map

Rio 2016 is the first time the CDG has archived events both on and off the playing field making this its biggest collection so far in terms of the number of nominations and geographical coverage. The CDG also enlisted the help of subject experts as well as the general public to nominate sites from countries not usually covered in IIPC collections. As the IIPC only has members in around 33 countries public nominations played an important role in filling this void.

What’s involved?
But what’s involved in web archiving the Olympics? CDG members the British Library and the National Library of Scotland co-hosted a Twitter chat on 10th August 2016 to give an insight on what’s involved. The Twitter chat was based on set questions published in an IIPC blog post with a Q&A session and some time for live nominations. This was an international chat with participants from the USA, Ireland, England, Scotland, Serbia and even Australia. The chat was added to Storify as well as the final archived collection of the Games. Even though the chat was small it helped us to connect with a wider audience and increase the number of public nominations. You can follow updates on this project on Twitter by using the collection hashtag #Rio2016WA.

How can you get involved?
There is still time for you to get involved in web archiving the Olympics and Paralympics. The public nomination form will be open till 23rd September 2016. If you would like to make a nomination you can follow these guidelines. As Carly Lloyd stated above the whole world is captivated by the Olympics now is your opportunity to be part of it.

By Helena Byrne, Assistant Web Archivist, The British Library

14 January 2013

Religion, politics and the law: a new special collection

It has been over two years in the making, but I am delighted to be able to say that my own special collection in the UK Web Archive is now online.

A couple of years ago, long before coming to the BL, I joined the Researchers and the UK Web Archive project at the Library which brought together a group of scholars to guest-curate special collections on our own particular research interests. As an historian, I was interested in the marked sharpening of the terms of discourse about the place of religion in British public life, particularly since 9/11 and the London bombings in 2005. It struck me that a good deal of this debate had already shifted online, and so new ways and means of capturing and preserving it were going to be needed. And so, the ‘politics of religion collection’ (as it was then known) was born. Religion politics law thumbnail

As has been noted many times in this blog, the problem for web archiving is that we’re dealing with other people’s copyright work, and so an individual permission is needed for each site. I have a long list of sites which I would dearly love to add to the collection, but for which (for various reasons) we’ve had no response. So, if you are the owner of Protest the Pope, or Holy Redundant, or Christians in Politics, please get in touch. For now, even if the collection cannot be anything like comprehensive, I do hope that it is at least coherent.

There are particular strengths, and some gaps. It includes many campaigning organisations, both secularist and religious, and is heavy on the conservative Christian organisations about which I myself know most. It is relatively light on non-Christian faiths, since I know the field much less well. It is still very much open, however, and so suggestions of sites that ought to be included are very welcome, via this blog or via the UK Web Archive site.

See a previous post about my progress in 2012.

Peter Webster

10 December 2011

Advent Calendar: December 10th

Electronic Iraq

Website established in 2003 'to provide a humanitarian perspective on the looming conflict in Iraq'.

Archived on: December 10th 2004

Still available on live web? Partially. 

Electronic-iraq
Archived by: The British Library

Subject Classifications: Arts & Humanities > News and Contemporary Events

Special collection? No

Other instances available? Yes - 13 in total, captured between 2004 and 2010.

 

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