UK Web Archive blog

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

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

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

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

Photo by '_Marion'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further recommended sources 

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

By Jason Webber, Web Archive Engagement Manager, British Library

This post is part of the #WebArchiveSummerOfSport series highlighting the many sporting websites that have been collected in the UK Web Archive.

Euro 2020
The European Championships 2020 (taking place in 2021) are underway across many venues across europe. In this tournament Scotland, England and Wales are all competing with England and Scotland in the same group. Eight games will take place in UK venues such as Wembley, Hampden Park.

Football Associations
The national football teams are organised and managed by their respective Associations. You can map many of the messages and developments at all levels of football through their websites in the archive.

Welsh FA
Here is the Welsh FA archived website from May 2010 that shows the senior men's squad. At the time Gareth Bale was a Defender at Tottenham Hotspur. 

The National Library of Wales has recently written a blog on the Welsh Team at Euro 2016.

The English FA
This archived website from May 2016 shows The FA just before the previous European Championships. Use the calendar view to see the messages from after the tournament.

Scottish FA
This is a screen shot of the live website of the Scottish FA. We collect the scottish FA website which is available to view in Reading rooms of UK Legal Deposit Libraries.

Good luck to all the home nations in the Euros! 

Jen Aggleton is a PhD candidate in Education at the University of Cambridge, and is completing a work placement at the British Library on the subject of digital comics. 

If you are a digital comics creator, publisher, or reader, we would love to hear from you. We’d like to know more about the digital comics that you create, find out links to add to our Web Archive collection, and find examples of comic apps that we could collect. Please email suggestions to [email protected]. For this initial stage of the project, we will be accepting suggestions until the end of August 2017.

I definitely didn’t apply for a three month placement at the British Library just to have an excuse to read comics every day. Having a number of research interests outside of my PhD topic of illustrated novels (including comics and library studies), I am always excited when I find opportunities which allow me to explore these strands a little more. So when I saw that the British Library were looking for PhD placement students to work in the area of 21st century British comics, I jumped at the chance.

Having convinced my supervisor that I wouldn’t just be reading comics all day but would actually be doing proper serious work, I temporarily put aside my PhD and came to London to read lots and lots of digital comics (for the purpose of proper serious work). And that’s when I quickly realised that I was already reading comics every day.

The reason I hadn’t noticed was because I hadn’t specifically picked up a printed comic or gone to a dedicated webcomic site every day (many days, sure, but not every day). I was however reading comics every day on Facebook, slipped in alongside dubiously targeted ads and cat videos. It occurred to me that lots of other people, even those who may not think of themselves as comics readers, were probably doing the same.

(McGovern, E. My Life As A Background Slytherin, https://www.facebook.com/backgroundslytherin/photos/a.287354904946325.1073741827.287347468280402/338452443169904/?type=3&theater Reproduced with kind permission of Emily McGovern.)

This is because the ways in which we interact with comics have been vastly expanded by digital technology. Comics are now produced and circulated through a number of different platforms, including apps, websites and social media, allowing them to reach further than their traditional audience. These platforms have made digital comics simultaneously both more and less accessible than their print equivalents; many webcomics are available for free online, which means readers no longer have to pay between £8 and £25 for a graphic novel, but does require them to have already paid for a computer/tablet/smartphone and internet connection (or have access to one at their local library, provided their local library wasn’t a victim of austerity measures).

Alongside access to reading comics, access to publishing has also changed. Anyone with access to a computer and internet connection can now publish a comic online. This has opened up comics production to many whose voices may not have often been heard in mainstream print comics, including writers and characters of colour, women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, those with disabilities, and creators who simply cannot give up the stability of full-time employment to commit the time needed to chase their dream of being a comics creator. The result is a vibrant array of digital comics, enormously varying in form and having a significant social and cultural impact.

But digital comics are also far more fragile than their print companions, and this is where the proper serious work part of my placement comes in. Comics apps are frequently removed from app stores as new platform updates come in. Digital files become corrupted, or become obsolete as the technology used to host them is updated and replaced. Websites are taken down, leaving no trace (all those dire warnings that the internet is forever are not exactly true. For more details about the need for digital preservation, see an earlier post to this blog). So in order to make sure that all the fantastic work happening in digital comics now is still available for future generations (which in British Library terms could mean ten years down the line, or five hundred years down the line), we need to find ways to preserve what is being created.

One method of doing this is to establish a dedicated webcomics archive. The British Library already has a UK Web Archive, due to the extension of legal deposit in 2013 to include the collection of non-print items. I am currently working on setting up a special collection of UK webcomics within that archive. This has involved writing collections guidelines covering what will (and won’t) be included in the collection, which had me wrestling with the thorny problem of what exactly a digital comic is (comics scholars will know that nobody can agree on what a print comic is, so you can imagine the fun involved in trying to incorporate digital elements such as audio and video into the mix as well). It has also involved building the collection through web harvesting, tracking down webcomics for inclusion in the collection, and providing metadata (information about the collection item) for cataloguing purposes (this last task may happen to require reading lots of comics).

Alongside this, I am looking into ways that digital comics apps might be preserved, which is very proper serious work indeed. Not only are there many different versions of the same app, depending on what operating system you are using, but many apps are reliant not only on the software of the platform they are running on, but sometimes the hardware as well, with some apps integrating functions such as the camera of a tablet into their design. Simply downloading apps will provide you with lots of digital files that you won’t be able to open in a few years’ time (or possibly even a few months’ time, with the current pace of technology). This is not a problem that can be solved in the duration of a three month placement (or, frankly, given my total lack of technical knowledge, by me at all). What I can do, however, is find people who do have technical knowledge and ask them what they think. Preserving digital comics is a complicated and ongoing process, and it is a great experience to be in at the early stages of exploration.

And you can be involved in this fun experience too! If you are a digital comics creator, publisher, or reader, we would love to hear from you. We’d like to know more about the digital comics that you create, find out links to add to our Web Archive collection, and find examples of comic apps that we could collect. Please email suggestions to [email protected]. For this initial stage of the project, we will be accepting suggestions until the end of August 2017. In that time, we are particularly keen to receive web addresses for UK published webcomics, so that I can continue to build the web archive, and do the proper serious work of reading lots and lots of comics.

[A guest post from Ian Cooke, lead curator for international studies and politics at the British Library, and curator of the current exhibition Propaganda: Power and Persuasion]

If you’ve visited our summer exhibition, Propaganda: Power and Persuasion, you will have seen our “Chorus” installation. Positioned on a large wall at the end of our exhibition, it displays a huge set of archived tweets that relate to three recent events (the Olympics opening ceremony, the debate on gun control in the United States, and President Obama’s ‘Four more years’, which became the most re-tweeted message). In our exhibition, we’re interested in the impact which social media is having on communicating and challenging influence from state and other powerful institutions.

There are different ways of looking at this. A simplification of one argument runs something like this: social media, through enabling access on an equal footing to the same shared public space, is a democratising tool that allows challenge to other forms of influence. People can respond to and question statements that appear dubious, and put across their own point of view. If propaganda is about narrowing the space for debate, then social media provides a powerful means to open it up. Additionally, the new technologies provide freely-available tools by which communities and grass-roots campaigns can network and co-ordinate action to powerful effect. I attended last year’s Netroots UK conference, where Sue Marsh gave an inspirational talk on digital activism and challenges to perceptions and prejudices used in the debate on cuts to welfare benefits for long-term sick and disabled people.       

However, some would offer a challenge to the view of social media as always empowering. The vast proliferation of information produced, and the speed by which it is received – so that events or messages are commented on immediately – means that it becomes very hard to check sources and accuracy. Misleading information, or just a point of view put strongly, can be repeated and run unchallenged. In some cases, authority and authorship can be hard to trace. Further, some would argue that new communications technologies allow new opportunities for misdirection in political campaigning. One example is so-called “astro-turfing”, where an apparently local and popular campaign  has in fact been set up and co-ordinated by a centralised and well-resourced body. Such activities have existed long before social media, but these new technologies create powerful new ways to both disguise and professionalise the role of the campaigner.

Over the past year, I had the opportunity to create a small collection of websites for the UK Web Archive as part of the Library’s ‘Curators Choice’ programme. This was a great opportunity to start exploring some of these issues, under the heading Political Action and Communication. The collection is more concerned with exploring the interpretation of new media as empowering and democratising, although some sites included, such as WhoFundsYou? are concerned with issues of transparency on the web.

In the collection you’ll find examples of websites set up to support specific campaigns, or organised around specific issues, such as the national and local Frack-Off campaigns against the use of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to extract shale gas from rock. The Occupy protests in London early in 2012 are represented through the Bank of Ideas, which was hosted in disused UBS offices in Hackney, and the Occupied Times of London. 

There are also examples of charities and companies that support other organisations in online campaigning. These include FairSay, Social Spark, and Hands Up. All these offer advice, web design and other new media support for charities and campaigning organisations. The Sheila McKechnie Foundation uses its own website and Campaign Central directory to offer support and resources for grass-roots campaigning (on and off-line) around Britain. 

I was also interested in the way that blogging is used in campaigning and political commentary. There are examples of individual blogs including Guido Fawkes and Never Seconds. Co-authored blogs can change the style of discussion by bringing in a wider range of viewpoints. Some present views from one political perspective, such as Left Foot Forward. Others attempt to represent a wider spectrum of debate, such as Speaker’s Chair. The latter is particularly interesting in light of criticisms of political communication on the web, which argue that debate quickly polarises as people essentially only read and follow people with whom they already agree.   

One area of campaigning that I specifically left out in this collection was party political campaigning during general elections. This is of course a huge area and presents its own challenges for web archiving, as sites are often live for only a short period. The UK Web Archive has however collected websites for the 2010 general election and 2005 general election, as well as the 2009 European parliamentary elections. You can also see more examples of campaign websites and political communication in our collection on the impact of the 2010 public spending cuts.

My thanks go to everyone who supported the Political Action and Communication collection, those who suggested sites and to those who agreed to have their websites archived. All the archived websites included here can be viewed from anywhere, and that of course requires permission from owners of websites – who are often busy running or supporting campaigns. As you’ll see this is a collection that I’m just getting started with, so I need to find more examples to explore further. If you have a site to suggest, would like to comment on the collection, or have found the collection useful, then I’d love to hear from you.

[Propaganda, Power and Persuasion runs at the British Library in St Pancras until 17 September.  Ian may be contacted by email at ian dot cooke at bl dot uk ]

The following is a guest post from Jo Stanley, author and blogger. We've been archiving Jo's blog in the UK Web Archive since April 2011.

I’m Jo Stanley and I call myself a creative historian and occasionally ‘a lifestory midwife’. People who worked on ships are my special area of historical interest. One of the books that will come out of all my hundreds of hours at the BL is Risk! Women on the Wartime Seas, a history of the women who were at sea in surprising numbers in WW1 and WW2 (Yale University Press). 

A lot of my products are based on the stories people tell me. But I use the British Library for my background research: autobiographies, histories, theoretical interpretations. I’ve been a fan – no other word will do - for about thirty years and remember my excitement when first I registered. My appreciation of the Library’s preserving role increased a hundred-fold when I was given a behind-the-scenes tour at Colindale.

In 2011 when staff from the UK Web Archive at BL emailed the news that my blog was one of those selected to be archived for posterity that really gave me a boost. And it changed my blogging practices. I write more frequently and more carefully, because of a greater sense of its significance. My entries are now made at least twice a month. I spend hours, no longer minutes, writing each entry as vividly and elegantly as I can; I make more effort to explain significances and acronyms. 

Having your blog harvested feels an oddly alienated experience. It’s like being a rose that knows the gardener is plucking it, but never feels the secateurs nor sees itself finally arranged in the vase with all the other blooms. So it really helped when the Head of Web Archiving Helen Hockx-Yu took the time to show me how the process worked. In her office papered with Chinese poems on the Underground I saw the crawler in operation, scuttling round and scooping up other’s blogs and websites like some diligent crab from a William Gibson sci-fi story. Finding out the program’s name, Heritrix, seemed to make the process feel more comprehensible. OK, it’s just another clever piece of software, like Photoshop. Hearing that I was one of the 10,000 websites owners and bloggers helped me see my in/significance within the UK Web Archive; it’s a bit like looking your house via Google Earth. And understanding that my ‘donation’ was collected every six months helped me get a sense that there was someone listening.

Books I’ve written have been in the library for years but having my blog saved there feels extra special.