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

Introduction

News and views from the British Library’s web archiving team and guests. Posts about the public UK Web Archive, and since April 2013, about web archiving as part as non-print legal deposit. Editor-in-chief: Jason Webber. Read more

24 January 2024

Exploring Alternative Access: Making the Most of Web Archives During UK Web Archive Downtime

Nicola Bingham, Lead Curator of Web Archiving, British Library

The British Library is continuing to experience disruption following a cyber-attack and are working hard to restore services. Disruption to some services is, however, expected to persist for several months. In the meantime, our buildings are open and we’ve released a searchable online version of our main catalogue, which contains records of the majority of our printed collections as well as some freely available online resources. Our reference team are on hand to answer queries, advise on collection item availability and help with other ways to complete your work. Please email [email protected] or find out more. The disruption is affecting our website, online systems and services. Please see our temporary website for up-to-date information.

Despite the disruption to access to the UK Web Archive, we continue to crawl or acquire copies of websites, as well as add new websites to our acquisition process which is being undertaken with Amazon Web Services in the Cloud, ensuring that the UK Web Archive collection is updated and preserved as usual.

We appreciate that for regular users of the UK Web Archive, the temporary unavailability of this valuable resource is inconvenient and disruptive. There exist several alternative openly accessible web archives that can serve as sources of information while the UK Web Archive is offline.

Other Openly Accessible Web Archives

Internet Archive: Known as the largest and most comprehensive web archive globally, it includes the famous Wayback Machine and boasts an extensive collection of archived web pages.

Understanding the Differences

While the Internet Archive captures a broad spectrum of global content, the UK Web Archive focuses specifically on the UK web. The UK Web Archive offers comprehensive crawls, curated collections, and secondary datasets for research. However, access is primarily restricted to legal deposit libraries, with some resources available openly.

The Internet Archive allows remote access to archived websites, but its search functionalities and scope differ from the UK Web Archive.

Memento Time Travel: This innovative platform operates under the Memento protocol, allowing users to view archived websites across various openly accessible web archives. It acts as a bridge, enabling access to past versions of web resources stored in archives such as the Internet Archive, Archive-It, UK Web Archive, archive.today, GitHub, and more. While it displays links to Mementos, it doesn’t retain the content itself.

Portuguese Web Archive (Arquivo.pt): Developed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, this archive aims to preserve and grant access to the Portuguese web domain and its contents. It also archives a significant amount of European Union and transnational content. It's a valuable resource for preserving the digital heritage of Portugal and contributing to the preservation of European and Portuguese-language online information.

UK Government Web Archive: An openly accessible archive preserving UK central government information, encompassing videos, tweets, images, and websites dating from 1996 to the present day.

UK Parliament Web Archive: This openly accessible archive covers parliamentary websites and social media content from 2009 to the present day.

National Records of Scotland Web Archive: Offering open access, this archive allows browsing and searching of websites related to Scotland’s people and history.

Seeking Information and Resources While the UK Web Archive is offline, the UK Web Archive blog remains accessible and serves as a useful source of information about the archive.

Additionally, although the UK Web Archive itself might be temporarily inaccessible, its information pages have been preserved by the Internet Archive, accessible [here] (https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://www.webarchive.org.uk).

For those keen on delving deeper, the British Library Research Repository houses supporting documents related to the UK Web Archive, such as collection scoping documents, annual reports, statistics, and research publications. The repository can be accessed [here](https://doi.org/10.23636/hj5v-3c07).

While the UK Web Archive takes a brief hiatus, we hope these alternative resources help. And perhaps embracing these other openly accessible archives might even unveil new avenues and perspectives for exploration.

While we work hard to recover all our online services you can find regular updates on progress published on our Knowledge Matters blog.

18 October 2023

UK Web Archive Technical Update - Autumn 2023

By Andy Jackson, Web Archive Technical Lead, British Library

This is a summary of what’s been going on since the 2023 Q2 report

Replication

The most important achievement over the last quarter has been establishing a replica of the UK Web Archive holdings at the National Library of Scotland (NLS). The five servers we’d filled with data were shipped, and our NLS colleagues kindly unpacked and installed them. We visited a few weeks later, finishing off the configuration of the servers so they can be monitored by the NLS staff and remotely managed by us.

This replica contains 1.160 PB of WARCs and logs, covering the period up until February 2023. But, of course, we’ve continued collection since then, and including the 2023 Domain Crawl, we already have significantly more data held at the British Library (about 160 TB more, ~1.3 PB in total). So, the next stage of the project is to establish processes to monitor and update the remote replica. Hopefully, we can update it over the internet rather than having to ship hardware back and forth, but this is what we’ll be looking into over the next weeks.

The 2023 Domain Crawl

As reported before, this year we are running the Domain Crawl on site. It’s had some issues with link farms, which caused the number of domains to leap from around 30 million to around 175 million, which crashed the crawl process.

2023-10-10-dc2023-queues

2023 Domain Crawl queues over time, showing peak at 175 million queues.

However, we were able to clean up and restart it, and it’s been stable since then. As of the end of this quarter we’ve downloaded 2.8 billion URLs, corresponding to 183 TB of (uncompressed) data.

Legal Deposit Access Service

We’ve continued to work with Webrecorder, who have added citation, search and print functionality to the ePub reader part of the Legal Deposit Access Service. This has been deployed and is available for staff testing, but we are still resolving issues around making it available for realistic testing in reading rooms across the Legal Deposit Libraries.

Browsertrix Cloud Local Deployment

We have worked out most of the issues around getting Browsertrix Cloud deployed in a way that complies with Non-Print Legal Deposit legislation and with our local policies. We are awaiting the 1.7.0 release which will include everything we need to have a functional prototype service.

Once it’s running, we can start trying our some test crawls, and work on how best to integrate the outputs into our main collection. We need some metadata protocol for marking crawls as ready for ingest, and we need to update our tools to carefully copy the results into our archival store, and support using WACZ files for indexing and access.

27 September 2023

What can you discover and access in the UK Web Archive collection?

UK Web Archiving team, British Library

The UK Web Archive collects and preserves websites from the UK. When we started collecting in 2005, we sought permission from owners to archive their websites. Since 2013, legal deposit regulations have allowed us to automatically collect all websites that we can identify as located in or originating from the UK. 

Since its inception, the UK Web Archive has collected websites using a number of different methods, with an evolving technological structure and under different legal regulations. The result of this means that what can be discovered and accessed is complicated and, therefore, not always easy to explain and understand. In this post we attempt to explain the concepts and terms of what a user will be able to find.

In the table below is a summary of the different search and access options which can be carried out via our main website (www.webarchive.org.uk). The rest of this post will go into more detail about the terms that we have used in this table.

Table of content availble in the UK Web Archive
Table of content availble in the UK Web Archive 

Year

In this table, ‘year’ refers to the year in which we archived a website, or web resource. This might be different to the year in which it was published or made available online. Once you have found an archived website, you can use the calendar feature to view all the instances, or ‘snapshots’ of that page (which might run over many years).  

Legal deposit regulations came into effect in April 2013. Before this date, websites were collected selectively and with the owners’ permissions. This means the amount of content we have from this earlier period is comparatively smaller, but (with some exceptions) is all available openly online. 

From 2013 onwards, we have collected all websites that we can identify as located in or originating from the UK. We do this once per year in a process that we call the ‘annual domain crawl.’

URL look-up

If you know the URL of a website you want to find in the UK Web Archive, you can use the search box at: https://www.webarchive.org.uk. The search box should recognise that you are looking for a URL, and you can also use a drop-down menu to switch between Full Text and URL search.

URL search covers the widest amount of the collection, and our index, which makes the websites searchable, is updated daily.

UKWA Search Bar September 2023
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/

Full text search

Much of the web archive collection has been indexed and allows a free-text search of the content, i.e., any word, phrase, number etc. Note: Given the amount of data in the web archive, the number of results will be very large.

Currently, full text search is available for all our automatically collected content up to 2015, and our curator selected websites up to 2017. 

Access at legal deposit libraries

Unless the website owner gives explicit permission otherwise, legal deposit regulations restrict access to archived websites to the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries. Access is in reading rooms using a library managed computer terminal.

Users will need a reader's pass to access a reading room: check the website of each Library on how to get a reader’s pass.

Online access outside a legal deposit library

We frequently request permission from website owners to allow us to make their archived websites openly accessible through our website. Where permission has been granted, these archived websites can be accessed from our website https://www.webarchive.org.uk/ from any location where you have internet access.

Additionally, we also make archived web content we can identify as having an Open Government Licence openly accessible.

From all the requests we send for open access to websites, we receive permission from approximately 25% of website owners.  However, these websites form a significant overall amount of content available in the archive. This is because they tend to be larger websites and are captured more frequently (daily, weekly, monthly etc.) over many years.

Curator selected websites

Each year, UK Web Archive curators, and other partners who we work with, identify thousands of resources on the web that are related to a particular topic or event, or that require more frequent collection than once per year.

Many of these archived websites form part of our Topics and Themes collections. We have more than 100 of these, covering general elections, sporting events, creative works, and communications between groups with shared interests or experiences. You can browse these collections to find archived web resources relating to these topics and themes. 

Annual Domain Crawl

Separate from selections made by curators, we conduct an annual ‘domain crawl’ to collect as much of the UK Web as possible. This is done under the Non-Print Legal Deposit regulations, with one ‘crawl’ completed each year. This domain crawl is largely automated and looks to archive all .uk, .scot, .wales, .cymru and .london top-level domain websites plus others that have been identified as being UK-based and in scope for collection.