UK Web Archive blog

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.

By Brendan Power, Digital Preservation Librarian, Library of Trinity College Dublin

At the recent conference, ‘Engaging with Web Archives: Opportunities, Challenges and Potentialities’, I presented a paper on a collaborative project between The Library of Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin, the Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, and the British Library. The project was carried out in 2015/16 and aimed to identify, collect, and preserve online resources related to the 1916 Easter Rising and the diverse ways it was commemorated and engaged with throughout its centenary in 2016. The Bodleian Libraries primarily collected UK websites under the provisions of the 2013 Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations (NPLD), while The Library of Trinity College Dublin focused on websites in the .ie domain. Since no legislation exists in the Republic of Ireland to ensure that the .ie domain is preserved, websites within the .ie domain were collected on a voluntary basis, that is, with the express formal permission of the website owners through the signing of a license agreement.

We aimed to reflect the variety of ways that the Irish and British states, cultural and educational institutions, as well as communities and individuals, approached the centenary events. These included official commemorative websites, the websites of museums, archives, heritage, cultural, and education institutions, along with traditional and alternative news media websites, blogs, and community websites. These resources will be invaluable primary resources to analyse how people interpreted and engaged with the Easter Rising in its centenary year. Researchers have reflected on the events organised on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966 and how these events were framed, the aspects that were championed, and the critical viewpoints denied expression. In a similar way, the records created throughout the centenary will be an essential resource for researchers in analysing how the generations of 2016 engaged with the legacy of the Easter Rising and the approaches, themes, and tone adopted.

The resulting web archive collection contains over 318 seeds, i.e. websites or sub-sections of these. Of these 318 websites, 112 (35%) were selected by The Library of Trinity College Dublin, 190 (60%) by the Bodleian Libraries, and 16 (5%) by curators at the British Library. 118 (37%) of the websites were from the .ie domain, 172 (54%) were from the .uk domain and 28 (9%) were associated with other areas, predominantly the USA. For all websites outside the UK (146), formal permission was sought from the website owners, resulting in 61 licenses to archive and make the archived copies publicly available. We received no response from 83 website owners, and 2 organisations agreed in principle to inclusion in the web archive but were not in a position to sign the license agreement required to allow us to archive the website as they could not affirm that they controlled the copyright of all the content that was to be archived. This meant an overall permissions rate of 42%, with the rate for websites in the .ie domain being even higher, at 51%.

Since the project was completed there have been many helpful reminders of the impact that such work has. This included one organisation that had created a website dedicated to an Easter Rising project which was no longer live on the web. The person that was responsible for the website had left the organisation and their replacement had no access to the materials that had been on the website. They had discovered an e-mail from me back in 2016 inviting them to participate in the web archive. Once they contacted me, I was able to direct them to the UK web archive and, as the organisation had signed the license agreement, they were able to access the archived website immediately from their office. This access had saved them both the time and staff resources that would have been expended in order to recreate some of the resources that were available on the archived website. It serves as an example of what embedding sustainability into a project can save in terms of time and staff resources and demonstrated the positive economic impact that organisations can derive by participation in cultural heritage initiatives such as web archives.

The co-curators of this collection have also previously published a paper on the collection in the academic journal, Internet Histories called Capturing commemoration: the 1916 Easter Rising web archive project.

You can watch Brendan Power’s presentation on the EWA YouTube Channel.

By Caio Mello, Doctoral Researcher at the School of Advanced Study, University of London

This blogpost is a summary of the presentation I delivered with my colleague Daniela Major in the conference Engaging with Web Archives: ‘Opportunities, Challenges and Potentialities’ in September 2020. This presentation is entitled ‘Tracking and analysing media events through web archives’.

My research explores the media coverage of the Olympic Games in a cross-cultural, cross-lingual and temporal perspective. I am especially interested in comparing how the concept of 'Olympic legacy' has been approached by the Brazilian and British media considering different locations, languages and social-political contexts. I have written a bit about this before on the UK Web Archive blog in December 2019 and March 2020.

Because of its controversial nature, the term Olympic legacy is used in a variety of contexts and it has multiple meanings. Considering its narrative importance to legitimize the billionaire investment of cities to host these events, this study has as the main objective to explore and define the concept of Olympic Legacy and how it changes over time.

Here however, I will be focusing on my experience doing a secondment at the British Library with the UK Web Archive team. I have explored the potential of using the platform Shine to track news articles on Olympic legacy.

Why Shine?

Shine is a tool to explore .uk websites archived by the Internet Archive between 1996 and April 2013. While a big part of the content of the UK Web Archive can only be accessed from inside the British Library, Shine is open access and provides us with search results and URL data that can be easier to manage.

We have developed a pipeline based on 5 steps: searching, extraction, cleaning, filtering and visualisation. To extract information, we have conducted web scraping of the data using Python notebooks looking at specific newspapers (like The Guardian) and broadcast websites (like BBC) using the keyword “Olympic legacy”. Having searched for URL’s in Shine and extracted the results, the main challenge is cleaning. After extracting just the body text of the articles, we saw that many of them did not mention Olympic legacy. Usually, Shine provides results where the words searched appear in peripheral locations of the webpage. Cleaning consists of removing all the information around the main text, such as images, adverts, menus and links. With the documents we needed in hand, we had to verify if their content is relevant or not to our analysis. Sometimes, the term Olympic legacy appears but it is not necessarily related to Rio and London Olympics or it is not the main topic of the article. The process of filtering demanded a huge effort of close reading to identify contexts. At the end, we have produced some charts to visualise word-trends and topics that pop up around legacy. Although the Shine search results are limited in terms of time - it searched up until 2013 - it has been very useful as an exploratory tool to conduct preliminary analysis in a small-scale, and to build web archive and web scraping methods before applying my methods to huge amounts of texts elsewhere. 

You can watch Caio de Castro Mello Santos & Daniela Cotta de Azevedo Major’s presentation on the EWA YouTube Channel.

*This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. For more information: cleopatra-project.eu.