Coming to the end of his short time working on web archives at the British Library, science-policy intern Peter Spooner reflects on the process of creating a web archive special collection.

Some issues with ‘Special Collections’

In my previous blog entry, I covered why we might want to create special collections. Here, I would like to examine the pros and cons of these collections in more detail.

In order for an archivist to create a special collection, he/she must come up with a subject, refine the scope of the topic to prevent the collection from becoming too large, and then collect websites. In my case - climate change – I decided to collect websites to show how climate change is portrayed across society (by charities, the energy sector, interested individuals, learned societies etc.) with a focus on the portrayal of climate science and policy. Whilst I hope such a collection will be interesting and useful, problems do exist.

In July, the British Library team headed to meet some environmental psychologists from Cardiff University. The major success of the meeting was to inform the researchers about web archiving and our climate change special collection. The resource was well received and was seen as being potentially useful. However, a number of issues came up before and during the discussion:

1. Each of the five researchers who attended had slightly different research interests;
2. How can we integrate these interests when creating archive resources?
3. How can the climate change collection be kept relevant as the subject evolves?
4. Who should be responsible for sustaining and updating the special collection?
5. What kinds of research question can be asked?

Widening the net

The last of these points I addressed in a previous blog entry, but the remainder are worth commenting on here. As I highlighted above, special collections are designed to be small and easy to use. However, such limited scope may not meet the needs of different researchers. There are several approaches one could take in order to try and resolve this issue. In some cases, collections may focus on a particular, event, such as a general election. The web content associated with these collections is often short-lived and after the event the collection would not need much updating. However, for collections on long-lasting themes, more involvement is required.

In one instance, thematic special collections could remain under the control of dedicated archivists. In this case, collection users could send in suggestions of websites to include when important events occur or new web material is created. Collections could be slightly expanded to be broad enough for a variety of user interests. However, the number of collections is necessarily limited by the time commitment of the web archivists.

Another possibility is that the archivists act as technical support whilst researchers create their own collections. This approach requires a greater input on the part of the researcher, but allows more collections to be created and maintained. Since they are designed by the users, each collection should be exactly fit for purpose. However, since each researcher is likely to have slightly different interests or questions in mind, the number of collections may be very large and some collections may closely mirror one another.

Listening to talks by academics involved in the British Library’s BUDDHA project, a common starting point for research was to create a corpus: a collection of written texts – in this case websites – of interest that could then be used to inform the research question. This approach is just what I have described above. A large number of corpora created by researchers could be stored by housing different groups of collections under common themes; so the theme of climate change could contain a number of collections on different aspects of the issue.

Moving forward

Perhaps the ideal model that the British Library could adopt is something of a combination of the above ideas. The Library may want to preserve the integrity of its existing special collections, which are carefully curated and designed for a wide range of users. These ‘Special Collections’ could remain under archivist control as described above, with contributions from user feedback. Alongside this core set of special collections could exist the more specific and numerous ‘Research Collections’ - those collections created by researchers. In this way the Library could make available a variety of resources that may be of interest to different users, combining the work of researchers and archivists to accommodate the limited time of both.

One thing we need to do in order to ensure the success of this combined approach is to get more and more researchers involved with creating collections. More projects like BUDDHA and further visits to interested academics will help to increase awareness of the web archive as a research resource, to grow it and turn it into an invaluable tool.

Peter Spooner, Science Policy Intern