By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives

Screenshot of Women's Rugby World Cup 2025 Website

England are the hosts for the Women's Rugby World Cup 2025. The group stages will take place in Brighton & Hove, Exeter, Bristol, Northampton, Manchester, York and Sunderland with the final taking place at Twickenham in London. England has hosted the tournament before but this is the first time that the tournament will be at Twickenham, the home of English rugby. 

The UK Web Archive is collaborating with other GLAM sector organisations, the official tournament partners from England 2025 (Local Organising Committee) and UK Sport to preserve the digital legacy of the Women's Rugby World Cup 2025.

Over the next few weeks there will be blog posts from the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) that will give an overview of what content they are selecting for the collection.

Due to the cyber-attack on the British Library in October 2023 the archive is not accessible at the moment but we are still actively archiving and preserving websites.

Fill in this nomination form with your favourite UK web content related to the tournament here: https://forms.gle/tRKJvFsajM1XCXq37 

To find out more about what type of content you can nominate, read the blog post What to nominate for Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025.

By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives

England are the hosts for the Women's Rugby World Cup 2025. The group stages will take place in Brighton & Hove, Exeter, Bristol, Northampton, Manchester, York and Sunderland with the final taking place at Twickenham in London. England has hosted the tournament before but this is the first time that the tournament will be at Twickenham, the home of English rugby. 

This is also the first time that the UK Web Archive has a dedicated collection for the Women's Rugby World Cup. There are many websites related to women's rugby across Britain and Northern Ireland in the Sports:Football > Rugby > Rugby Union collection. Due to the cyber-attack on the British Library in October 2023 the collection is not accessible at the moment but we are still actively archiving and preserving websites.

Over the next few weeks we will be archiving as much as we can about the Women's Rugby World Cup 2025 but we need your help.

Fill in this nomination form with your favourite UK web content related to the tournament here: https://forms.gle/tRKJvFsajM1XCXq37 

What content should I nominate?

Information about what the UK Web Archive does and does not archive

You can nominate any UK published content related to the tournament whether it is a full website, a subsection of a website, individual pages or social media. This content will generally sit within one or sometimes two of the six subsections in this collection. 

Collection subsections:

Cultural Events: Any websites and social media accounts related to the cultural events during the tournament. This includes arts, heritage and learning events.

Fans: Websites, blogs and social media accounts written by fans of the sport.

Organisational Bodies/Venues: UK Sport, World Rugby, match stadiums and local government websites.

Press Media & Comment: News and comment, including the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 on BBC and other media websites etc..

Sponsors: UK Websites and news articles relating to some of the official sponsors of the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025.

Teams: Websites and social media accounts of players' based in the UK. This will mostly be made up of players from Britain and Northern Ireland but also a few players from the other countries that qualified for the competition and live in the UK.

Examples:

• Full website: https://www.rugbyworldcup.com/2025/ 
• Subsection of a website: https://www.therugbypaper.co.uk/all/world/womens-international/womens-rugby-world-cup/ 
• Individual page from a website: https://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/business/businesses-encouraged-to-get-involved-ahead-of-the-womens-rugby-world-cup-2025-5192655 
• Event/campaign page: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/inspiring-women-talk-trish-brown-tickets-1306835663649 

For social media accounts we can only archive a selection of these using Browsertrix. This is a manual process that yields mixed results. We only archive social media accounts of public figures and not groups that require a login. 

Fill in this nomination form with your favourite UK web content related to the tournament here: https://forms.gle/tRKJvFsajM1XCXq37 

By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives

Digital Methodologies for the Study of Religion event details

The UK Web Archive participated in the one day symposium Digital Methodologies for the Study of Religion on 25th June 2025. This knowledge exchange symposium was organised as part of the ESRC-funded Digital British Islam Project. It was a hybrid event with a mix of online presentations and in person presentations at Coventry University. 

The fourteen presentations were divided into four thematic panels: Panel 1 – Innovative Methods and Platforms, Panel 2 – Digital Archives and Cataloguing, Panel 3 – Mixed Methods and Online-Offline Dynamics and Panel 4 – Emerging Ethical Challenges.

The UK Web Archive participated in Panel 2 – Digital Archives and Cataloguing. The first speaker, Emily Cottrell from Université de Strasbourg, outlined a project that produced an online database to study digitised religious texts. The final two presentations in the panel were  from Gary R Bunt from Digital British Islam at University of Wales Trinity Saint David and Anna Grasso from Digital Islam Across Europe at University of Edinburgh. Professor Bunt outlined the scope of the Digital British Islam web archive collection as well as the lessons learnt from developing the curation skills needed to develop a web archive collection. Dr Grasso then gave an overview of the Digital Islam Across Europe web archive collection and how they were able to use the ARCH platform through their Archive-It subscription. It was really interesting to hear curatorial insights from these web archive collections and how the data collected can be used to further understand the lived experience of Islamic communities in Britain and across Europe. 

The British Library presentation was Using the UK Web Archive to understand religion on the web. This presentation gave a general introduction to the UK Web Archive explaining who is involved in curating the UK Web Archive collections, an overview of Non-Print Legal Deposit and how this shapes curation practices. It gave an overview of how religion is represented within the UK Web Archive. Religions are broadly represented across many of the over one hundred curated collections and there are currently nine individual collections that focus on a topic related to religion. The presentation gave an overview of the recent work we did to publish metadata from the UK Web Archive as data by co-developing the Datasheets for Web Archives Toolkit. So far, the Scottish Churches - Collection Seed List is the only data set related to religion that has been published but keep an eye on the UK Web Archive for updates on when the next phase of data sets will be published.  

Potential research example with the Scottish Churches - Collection Seed List data set

All the presentations gave methodological insights that could be reused by researchers studying a different subject and I would highly recommend checking out the recordings when they are made available through the project website: https://digitalbritishislam.com/

One highlight for anyone who manages a GLAM sector catalogue was the presentation by Dr. Nur Efeoglu who presented Curating Islam Online: Religious Heritage in UK Museum Digital Catalogues. This presentation focused on reviewing three UK museum catalogues for content related to the Selçuk and Ottoman period. The lessons learnt from this report are valuable for running any effective catalogue. My favourite quote from this presentation was "curation should be a collaboration not a monologue". This is something we try to encourage in the UK Web Archive by collaborating with subject experts to curate collections on various topics and from gathering nominations for the archive from the public.