UK Web Archive blog

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 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] 

By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives, Frankie Perry, Music Manuscripts and Archives Cataloguer and Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator for Contemporary British Collections

UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association Launch Event Banner

The First Annual Event for the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association took place  on 29th and 30th June 2023 at Senate House, University of London as well as online. The Association “aims to build a collaborative vision for the field, and create new and sustainable long-term partnerships in alignment with the international community”. The programme set across one and half days covered a wide variety of topics and included an opportunity for the Community Interest Groups to meet up. 

The British Library was involved in four presentations either as an individual presentation or as part of a collaborative project. In this blog post we hear back from the British Library colleagues who attended.

Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives

I was involved in two collaborative presentations with Sharon Healy (Maynooth University) and Juan-José Boté-Vericad (Universitat de Barcelona). Our first presentation was a lightning talk on day one called 'Finding Web Archives under the ‘Big Tent’ of DH: A Case Study of Ireland and the UK'. This presented one element of a forthcoming chapter in a WARCnet edited collection on web archiving. This presentation reviewed postgraduate courses for the provision of web archiving in information management and digital humanities courses in Britain and Ireland. Our second presentation was part of Panel #2 on day two called 'The Potential of a Reborn Digital Archival Edition for Collating a Corpus of Archived Web Materials'. This presentation outlined a methodology for researchers without coding skills to select, collate and analyse a corpus of archived websites. 

The highlight for me was Panel #3, especially the presentation 'Towards a Critical Black Digital Humanities: A Critical Librarian’s Response' by Naomi L.A Smith (University of West London). This presentation and the discussion that followed highlighted some of the challenges as well as some of the positive action steps that can be taken to ensure digital humanities research is more inclusive. 

Frankie Perry, Postdoctoral Research Assistant, InterMusE project, University of York / Music Manuscripts and Archives Cataloguer, British Library

I gave a paper with Prof. Rachel Cowgill (University of York) who is Principal Investigator on the InterMusE project – a collaborative venture between musicologists, computer scientists, and archive and library specialists funded by the AHRC’s UK-US New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions programme. The British Library is an institutional partner, with Dr Rupert Ridgewell (Lead Curator, Printed Music) as Co-Investigator; the universities of Swansea and Illinois at Urbana-Champagne are further partners, and we’re also working with the University of Waikato. In our paper, we introduced the complexities of sourcing, digitising, and piecing together ephemera relating to historical musical events (eg. concert programmes, flyers, newspaper reviews), using as our case study materials relating to the British Music Society (1918-1933) and its regional centres and branches. We showed the interface of the digital archive built for the project, which uses a combination of the Greenstone Digital Library system, the Mirador Annotation Viewer, and the SimpleAnnotationServer to make materials browsable, searchable, and interactive for musicologists and community users alike.

I really enjoyed the event and the snapshot it provided into current digital humanities research and techniques. I especially enjoyed a paper by Orla Delaney (Cambridge) on 'Database ethnography and the museum object record', and one by Lisa Griffith (Digital Repository of Ireland) and Laura Molloy (CODATA) titled 'Pathways to collaboration – creating and sharing GLAM image collections as data'.

Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator for Contemporary British Collections

My lightning talk 'Collaborating to Curate and Exhibit Complex Digital Literature' reflected on the cooperation between curators, researchers, experimental writers and creative practitioners to plan and produce the British Library’s Digital Storytelling exhibition (2 June 2023 - 15 October 2023). A hands-on display, which explores the ways that digital innovations have transformed and enhanced our narrative experiences. Showcasing eleven examples of electronic literature that invite readers to become a part of the story themselves, through interactive narratives that respond to user input, reading experiences influenced and personalised by data feeds, and works that draw from multiple platforms and audience participation to create immersive story worlds. Preparing and in some cases modifying these interactive works to display them in a public gallery has only been possible through practical collaborations between Library staff with the writers and games studios who created these digital stories. I shared some insights from my experience of this co-curation work and encouraged attendees to visit the exhibition.

It was a pleasure to meet a number of people in real life who I had only previously spoken with online. A personal highlight was hearing Reham Hosny from the University of Cambridge and Minia University speak about 'DH and E-Lit Communities: Intersectional Perspectives'. In the refreshment breaks at this event I chatted with Reham about her novel, Al-Barrah (The Announcer) and she demonstrated to me how both augmented reality and hologram technologies work with the printed book to immerse readers in this thought provoking narrative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics

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

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

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

Browse the collection here:

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

UEFA Women’s Euro England 2022

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

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

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

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

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

Commonwealth Games Birmingham 2022

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

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

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

Rugby League World Cup 2021

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

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

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

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

Access to the collections 

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

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

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

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

Get involved

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

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

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 Hannah Connell, Collaborative PhD Student, King’s College London; British Library

I spoke about my position as a curator for the Russia in the UK curated collection as part of the recent Engaging with Web Archives conference (EWA), which was held online from the 21^st-22^nd of September 2020. This conference reflected the breadth of the web archiving community, bringing together speakers from researchers to librarians, as well as curators and web archiving teams from many different countries.

As always, it was inspiring to participate in such a welcoming event. Even online, the conference retained the collaborative atmosphere which has marked my experience of research in web archiving, allowing new researchers to interact with more experienced practitioners and encouraging questions and conversations between researchers, users and archivists.

The researcher-curated collection, Russia in the UK, is part of the UK Web Archive (UKWA). I was particularly pleased to have had the opportunity to present this curated collection, a resource on the Russian-speaking community in the UK, which was first started in November 2017. Such collections play an important role in making the wide range of material preserved in the UKWA more visible to researchers.

Curators are important to the preservation work of the UKWA. Curated collections are collected manually by curators and researchers with specialist knowledge in their field. The role of a curator in creating a UKWA collection involves identifying relevant websites to be included in a collection, and recording the metadata for these websites, including the translation and transliteration of titles and descriptions in other languages.

This collection is valuable both as a resource for further research, and as a means of questioning research practices. It is not possible to capture everything on the web, and collection curators ensure that a representative sample of websites for each thematic collection are selected. The practice of creating and maintaining a collection such as the Russia in the UK  ultimately influences the shape of the collection and the online representation of the diasporic community it will come to reflect. As such, it is important for researchers and users to understand the decisions taken by curators in selecting and capturing websites.

My paper for EWA focused on the creation of a curation guide for curators of new curated collections. This  draws on the ongoing process of curating the Russia in the UK collection, documenting both the provenance of this special collection and reflecting on this process as a model for future collections.  

In documenting the creation of this collection, I hope to enable future researchers to explore and contribute to this record of the online activity of the Russian diaspora in the UK, and to question and develop the curatorial and research practices behind the curation of collections.

You can watch Hannah Connell’s presentation on the EWA YouTube channel.

By Dr. Peter Webster, Independent Scholar, Historian and Consultant

The historian of the late 1990s has a problem. The vast bulk of content from the period is no longer on the live web; there are few, if any, indications of what has been lost – no inventory of the 1990s web against which to check. Of the content that was captured by the Internet Archive (more or less the only archive of the Anglophone web of the period), only a superficial layer is exposed to full-text search, and the bulk may only be retrieved by a search for the URL. We do not know what was never archived, and in the archive it is difficult to find what we might want, since there is no means of knowing the URL of a lost resource. Sometimes we need, then, to understand the archived web using only the technical data about itself that it can be made to disclose.

Niels Brügger has defined a web sphere as ‘web material … related to a topic, a theme, an event or a geographic area’.  My paper at the EWA conference presents a method of reconstructing a web sphere, much of which is lost from the live web and exists only in the Internet Archive: the web estate of the many conservative Christian campaign groups in the UK in the 1990s and early 2000s.

This method of web sphere reconstruction is based not on page content but on the relationships between sites, i.e., the web of hyperlinks. The method is iterative, and tracks back and forth between big data and small. Individual archived pages and directories, printed sources, the scholarly record itself, and even traces of previous unsuccessful attempts at web archiving come into play, as does a large dataset held by the British Library. From the more than 2 billion lines in the UK Host Link Graph dataset it is possible to extract the outlines of this particular web sphere.

You can watch Peter Webster’s presentation on his website peterwebster.me. 

Previous studies using a similar method are: 

Webster, Peter. 2019. Lessons from cross-border religion in the Northern Irish web sphere: understanding the limitations of the ccTLD as a proxy for the national web. In The Historical Web and Digital Humanities: the Case of National Web domains, eds Niels Brügger & Ditte Laursen, 110-23. London: Routledge.  http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/yms5-9v95     

Webster, Peter. 2017. Religious discourse in the archived web: Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, and the sharia law controversy of 2008. In: The Web as History, eds Niels Brügger & Ralph Schroeder, 190-203. London: UCL Press. (Available Open Access at:  https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/84010)

By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives at the British Library

Creepy crawlers - British Library digitised image from page 79 of "The Child's Book of Poetry. A selection of poems, ballads and hymns"

Halloween and the UK Web Archive

From the start of October all the shops and supermarkets were filling up with Halloween costumes, decorations and lots of fun sized confectionery that are easy to share with some of the trick-o-treaters who might be knocking on your door. It is not clear yet how the coronavirus pandemic will impact any of the informal celebrations that take place every year. No doubt the UK Web Archive crawlers are picking up lots of Halloween and 5th of November themed webpages as part of the 2020 Domain Crawl.

Halloween in the UK is often perceived to be a cultural import from North America. A YouGov poll in 2019 showed that only 30% of people surveyed were planning to celebrate the occasion. This Shine graph shows how the popularity of the term on the archived .uk web has increased in popularity over time. 

Click on a point in the graph to see a sample of how the phrase is used.

Halloween History

The tradition of Halloween actually goes back centuries and was widely celebrated by people in Ireland, Britain and northern France. During pagan times, the 1st of November was officially the start of winter, this season was  associated with death as the crops, wildlife and many people died due to the cold and lack of sunlight during this period. Because of this day’s association with death, it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth on the night of the 31st October. It was during the Reformation that the tradition of celebrating Halloween died out in Britain, especially in England. 

A recent YouGov poll has shown that Guy Fawkes Night is more popular in Great Britain than Halloween. 

The 5th of November

The commemoration on the 5th of November goes by many names, traditionally it was Guy Fawkes Night but is sometimes referred to as Bonfire Night or Fireworks Night. But there seems to be some regional differences in what term is used and how the night is celebrated. 

What do you call this commemoration?

This is a question we visited back in 2017 and as you can see in the Shine graph in more recent years the term Bonfire Night was used more widely on the archived .uk web. 

Get creative with Halloween at the British Library

Our Assistant Web Archivist, Carlos Lelkes-Rarugal, has designed some short animated videos using recordings from the British Library Sound Archive and images from the Ghosts & Ghoulish Scenes, British Library Flickr. See these on the UK Web Archive, Digital Scholarship and the Sound Archive’s Wildlife Department Twitter accounts.

This and other sounds can be experienced in the Sound Archive at the British Library which has over 260,000 wildlife sound recordings from all over the world. You can hear a selection of some of these recordings on the British Library, Sound & Vision blog, the latest blog post Going Batty for Halloween, gives an overview of the history of bats and Halloween. 

The Digital Scholarship’s latest blog post, Mind Your Paws and Claws, encourages you to use these images and sounds for various creative projects. The Ghosts & Ghoulish Scenes Flickr Album was previously used in the Gothic Off the Map competition. 

Get involved with preserving the UK web

The UK Web Archive aims to archive, preserve and give access to the historic UK web space. We endeavour to include important aspects of British culture and events that shape society. 

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

We have a Festivals collection, but are there any local Halloween or 5th of November events near you that haven’t been added yet? Equally, if these events have now been cancelled, we would like to add some of these online cancellation notifications to our collection Coronavirus (COVID-19) UK. Browse through what we have so far and please nominate more content!

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

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.