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

3 posts categorized "Books"

21 September 2023

How YouTube is helping to drive UK Web Archive nominations

By Carlos Lelkes-Rarugal, Assistant Web Archivist, British Library

Screenshot of the UK Web Archive website 'Save a UK website' page.
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/nominate

There currently exists a plethora of digital platforms for all manner of online published works; YouTube itself has become more than just a platform for sharing videos, it has evolved into a platform for individuals and organisations to reach a global audience and convey powerful messages. Recently, a popular content creator on YouTube, Tom Scott, produced a short video helping to outline the purpose of Legal Deposit and by extension, the work being carried out by UKWA.

Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM

Tom Scott’s video, titled "This library has every book ever published", is a concise and authentic glimpse into the work being done by the British Library, one of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries. The video highlighted some of the technology being used that enables preservation at scale, which also highlighted the current efforts in web archiving. Dr Linda Arnold-Stratford (Head of Liaison and Governance for the Legal Deposit Libraries) stated, “The Library collection is around 170 million items. The vast majority of that is Legal Deposit”. Ian Cooke (Head of Contemporary British and Irish Publications) highlighted that with the expansion of Legal Deposit to include born-digital content that “the UK Web Archive has actually become one of the largest parts of the collection. Billions of files, about one and a half terabytes of data”.

At the time of writing, the video has had over 1.4 million views. In addition, as the video continued to gain momentum, something remarkable happened. UKWA started receiving an influx of email nominations from website owners and members of the public. This was unexpected and the volume of nominations that have since come through has been impressive and unprecedented. 

The video has led to increased engagement with the public; with nominations representing an eclectic mix of websites. The comments on the video have been truly positive. We are grateful to Tom for highlighting our work, but we are also thankful and humbled that so many commentators have left encouraging messages, which are a joy to read. The British Library has the largest web archive team of all the Legal Deposit Libraries, but this is still a small team of three curators and four technical experts where we do everything in-house from curation to the technical side. Web archiving is a difficult task but we are hopeful that we can continue to develop the web archive by strengthening our ties to the community by bringing together our collective knowledge.

If you know of a UK website that should be included in the archive, please nominate it here:  https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/info/nominate

19 February 2013

Nineteenth century English literature: a new special collection

[A guest post from Andrea Lloyd, Curator of Printed Literary Sources, 1801-1914 at the British Library]

After almost a year of gathering I’m pleased to announce that my ‘Curator’s Choice’ collection of websites relating to 19th century English literature has now been published on the UK Web Archive.

As a curator of printed literary sources for the period 1801-1914 it doesn’t require a great leap of imagination to discover why I chose this particular topic. The collection is intended to reflect the diverse interests in the genre that are substantiated on the web. Opinions about, and interpretations of 19th century literature and its authors are constantly evolving and I hope that this resource contextualises these important scholarly and cultural changes.

The sites included so far display a broad and eclectic array of subject matters – ranging from author societies to museums; from literary adaptations to academic syllabi. 19th century literature is still hugely popular and attracts a wide audience. Given the massive interest in the likes of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, I initially thought I would concentrate on lesser-known authors, and on literature that has grown somewhat obscure in the intervening years. This ultimately isn’t how the collection has evolved – sometimes because many of the more niche sites are published without giving any administrator contact details (so permission cannot be sought to archive the site). In other cases, the owners have not responded to permission requests – often because they have cast the sites off into the vast ‘webosphere’ to fend for themselves.

Anna_t BY-NC-SA Flickr

As someone who works with 19th century printed ephemera on a regular basis I found this exercise particularly fascinating. Pertinent comparisons can be drawn between the ephemeral items that are published on the web and those that were printed in the 19th century. A great deal of the ephemeral literature produced in the 19th century has survived to this day (albeit in a fragile state) – either through luck or thanks to collectors with foresight. Given its transient and contributory nature there is a great danger that similar items produced in electronic formats may not be so lucky – hence the reason the Web Archive is so vital. Hopefully my 22nd century counterpart will thank me for choosing to preserve for posterity some of the more marginal, fleeting and subjective sites available relating to the genre!

Now it’s available for all to see, I hope that others will recommend sites that they think would complement the theme and  help to create a lasting snapshot of 19th century literary scholarship in the 21st century. Do get in touch via this blog, or @UKWebArchive on Twitter.

[Image by anna_t, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA]

08 December 2011

Advent Calendar: December 8th

Martin Blyth (poet)

Website archived on: 8th December 2005

Still available on live web? No. Martin passed away in 2006. 

Blyth
Archived by: The British Library

Subject Classification: Arts & Humanities > Literature 

Special collection? No

Other instances available? No