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

9 posts categorized "Social media"

04 October 2021

UK Web Archive Climate Change Collection

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.

Desert landscape - Photo by '_Marion'
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. 

UKWA Climate change nomination-form

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 

07 June 2021

Curating the UKWA LGBTQ+ Lives Online collection

By Ash Green and Steven Dryden - LGBTQ+ Lives Online lead curators

The LGBTQ+ Lives Online collection has been live now for almost a year. This has given us the time to gain a better understanding of the content in it, and also how people are interacting with the collection. Based on this, we wanted to consider some of the challenges around structuring, tagging and representing sites within it.

Sub-Collections & Subject tagging

When the collection was set up, one of the tasks that needed to be undertaken was defining the structure of the sub-collections. At this stage they are organised as follows:

  • Activism/Pride
  • Arts, Literature, Music & Culture
  • Business/Commerce
  • Education
  • History
  • Medicine and Community
  • Policy and Legislative Change
  • Religion
  • Social Organisations
  • Sport

We defined the sub-collections based on what we thought would be added to the collection, without actually knowing what the majority of that content might be. As more sites have been added we can see that some sub-collections work well and others not so well. We are getting a sense of which sub-collections might need to be revisited.

One sub-collection that at this stage requires more consideration in terms of whether it should be changed or split, is Medicine & Community. When we set this up, it felt like a logical pairing – both aspects of the sub-collection are about well-being, with one indicating it’s about medical support, and the other about wellness achieved through peer support. But now, as we add more sites to this sub-collection, the terminology doesn’t feel quite right. This is especially true when sites focused more on well-being, emotional support and guidance, such as Spectra and Outline Surrey are included in the sub-collection. Possibly a more appropriate sub-collection name would be Health & Community, which would still allow the inclusion of medical and community wellness, but under a clearer umbrella.

No homophobia, no violence t-shirt

When the collection was set up, Retirement also featured as a sub-collection. We eventually removed this before go-live. Not because it wasn’t relevant, but because there was insufficient online content within the collection to justify including it at this stage. That said, that may change over time and an increase in sites focusing on both retirement and older LGBTQ+ people’s lives may result in us re-instating it or a similar sub-collection. Similarly, other themes might rise out of existing sites in the collection that would require new sub-collections to be added, or even new subjects to be included. Part of the key purpose of the collection is to not only archive appropriate web sites, but to also make them findable via the sub-collections.

As well as adding sites to sub-collections within the LGBTQ+ Lives Online collection, they can also be assigned to other collections and sub-collections. For example, Graces Cricket Club (a gay cricket club) appear in both the LGBTQ+ Lives Online / Sport sub-collection and the separate Sport: Football collection. In cases like this, there’s no question that it’s perfectly appropriate to include this site in both subject collections. However, in some instances, LGBTQ+ sites have also been previously included in inappropriate sub-collections. For example, one site in the collection had previously been assigned to Medicine and Health / Conditions & Diseases sub-collection before the LGBTQ+ Lives

Online project began. This incorrectly implied that being an LGBTQ+ person was either a “condition” or a “disease”. This has been corrected, but it highlights that we also need to be aware that choosing which collection or sub-collection we add a site to has implications about how a curator perceives that site, and the negative bias we may in turn present to collection users by including a site in an inappropriate sub-collection.

Content Warnings
Another area we are considering is content warnings. When we recently ran an online session about the collection, we were asked if any content warnings were included in the descriptions of sites tagged within the collection. Another person also expressed concern about the inclusion of sites within the LGBTQ+ Lives Online collection that were negative or hostile towards members of the LGBTQ+ community. Though these sites are included, they do not provide content warnings about their harmful and negative perspectives or context about their inclusion. Again, this is a valid comment, and content warnings would help identify that users were about to enter a site whose perspectives might be problematic or triggering.

Keyboard - caution

You may also be wondering why sites such as the ones that are negative or hostile towards members of the LGBTQ+ community are included in the collection? It goes back to the purpose of this project, which is to archive UK sites that reflect UK LGBTQ+ lives and experiences. This includes positive, neutral and negative sites if relevant. For example, we include at least one site in the collection that questions the validity of trans and gender non-conforming people as apart of the LGBTQ+ community. If we didn’t include this site, it would not give a balanced picture of trans people’s experience, as it would miss out on a key factor that has had a huge impact on many trans lives over the past few years. As such, even though we do not agree with questioning the validity of trans and gender non-

conforming people, those sites are valid to LGBTQ+ research and discussion. But it’s not just sites like these that we would consider including a content warning against. Any sites highlighting LGBTQ+ phobic or hate content may also be included.

Content warnings are not something we’ve considered before, and at present, the cataloguing rules for the UK Web Archive collection don’t have capacity for the inclusion of content warnings. However, following on from these conversations, it is something we need to address, along with highlighting that including content within the collection does not necessarily mean that the curators agree with the opinions in those sites.

The structure of the sub-collections and content warnings are areas that we want to address as soon as we can, and it is something we would like to discuss with the wider LGBTQ+ community. How we achieve that is yet to be decided, but we are always open to suggestions.

In the mean-time, don’t forget that you can explore the LGBTQ+ Lives Online UK Web Archive collection.

You can also nominate sites for inclusion in the collection.

 

17 March 2021

Shakespeare in the UK Web

By Jason Webber, Web Archive Engagement Manager, The British Library

It's Shakespeare week (15-21 March). William Shakespeare is, almost certainly, the most quoted literary figure (in English) and the popularity of his plays and poems endures into the digital age. His work is continuingly being taught, examined, analysed and most of all, quoted on the internet. Often quoted in unlikely places such as 'Now is the winter of our discontent' on the Butterfly Conservation website.

Shakespeare-butterfly

Most Popular?
What are the most popular Shakespeare quotes? Perhaps unsurprisingly 'To be or not to be" has far and away the most mentions in our SHINE service - all .uk websites collected 1996-2012 (JISC dataset obtained from the Internet Archive):

Shakespeare quotes 01

Shakespeare quotes from SHINE

If we take away "to be or not to be" this graph looks even more interesting:

Shakespeare quotes 02

Shakespeare quotes from SHINE

Want to try your own Shakespeare quotes in our SHINE service?

  1. Go to the trends page of SHINE: www.webarchive.org.uk/shine/graph
  2. Add a word or phrase into the input box, NOTE: phrases should go in quotes e.g. "all that glisters"
  3. To compare multiple words or phrases, separate by a comma e.g. "william shakespeare", "christopher marlowe, "ben johnson"
  4. Click on any point in the graph to see examples of the context the word or phrase was used
  5. Enjoy!

Do let us know your own favourite quotes on Twitter: @UKWebArchive

31 July 2020

LGBTQ+ Lives Online

 
 A white banner with the LGBTQ+ flag colours painted on with the text - love is love
Photo by 42 North from Pexels

By Steven Dryden, British Library LGBTQ+ Staff Network & Ash Green CILIP LGBTQ+ Network

 

When the internet first rose to prominence in the late 1990s, one of the primary modes of communicating with others was through internet chat rooms and forums. Suddenly, isolated people all over the world with a personal computer and internet access could communicate with others ‘like them’.

By using the term ‘like them’ we acknowledge that there is some form of social oppression which makes a person, perhaps alone in a rural community, feel unable to be themselves - to know anything about themselves at all. It is perhaps partly for the need to feel more connected with other people ‘like them’ that LGBTQ+ people adapted to online community-building quickly. Now, as we have been living online for over 25 years, it seems pertinent to consider what traces of early digital lives survive, and how we can begin to make sense of it. What survives of digital campaigns to legalise the age of consent for all sexualities in the UK (2001), gain recognition and protections of members of the trans community (Gender Recognition Act 2004) or the battle for marriage equality in the UK (England and Wales, 2013, Scotland 2014, Northern Ireland 2019)? As well as historical content such as this, we must also ensure we are ready and able to curate current and future online discussions and websites surrounding LGBTQ+ lives as well.

Part of this process has already begun. Through the UK Web Archive, the British Library along with the other five UK Legal Deposit Libraries, has been able to run an annual domain crawl of the UK web since April 2013, after the implementation of Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations. Prior to this websites were archived on a permissions basis since January 2005. Through the Shine interface you can search the JISC UK Web Domain Dataset (1996-2013), this holds all the .uk websites archived by the Internet Archive from 1996 to April 2013. As a next step, the British Library and Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) LGBTQ+ Network are pleased to work collaboratively and develop LGBTQ+ Lives Online. This project will tag and subject categorise relevant websites in the UK Web Archive, and expand the scope of websites we collect for future generations. We look forward to sharing with you over the coming months the work that is being undertaken and how you can contribute.

CILIP LGBTQ+ Network members are pleased to be working collaboratively with the British Library and the UK Web Archive on this project, and recognise the historical value and importance of developing the LGBTQ+ Lives Online web archive.

The aim of the UK Web Archive is to collect content published on the UK web that reflects all aspects of life in the UK. This includes important aspects of British culture and events that shape society. The LGBTQ+ Lives Online collection reflects the important role this community plays in British society. The UK Web Archive is delighted to collaborate with the British Library LGBTQ+ Staff Network and the CILIP LGBTQ+ Network to build on the existing LGBTQ+ collection. Although there is a dedicated collection about the LGBTQ+ community, many of the websites tagged in this collection also intersect with other collections in the archive such as our various sports collections, Political Action and Communication and Oral History in the UK.

 

Get Involved:

CILIP LGBTQ+ Network, the British Library and the UK Web Archive welcome nominations for UK websites which should be included in the LGBTQ+ Lives Online.

Nominations can be made via this form: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/nominate

 

Keep an eye on the CILIP LGBTQ+ Network Twitter as well as the UK Web Archive blog and Twitter account for more updates on the LGBTQ+ Lives Online collection.

 

24 June 2020

Our new Science web archive collection

 
By Philip Eagle, Subject Librarian - Science, Technology and Medicine at The British Library
 
 
Air pump CC0
A Philosopher Shewing an Experiment on the Air Pump, 1769 by Valentine Green

 

Introduction

We have just activated our new web archive collection on science in the UK. One of the British Library's objectives as an institution as a whole is to increase our profile and level of service to the science community. In pursuit of this aim we are curating a web archive collection in collaboration with the UK legal deposit libraries. We have some collections already on science related subjects such as the late Stephen Hawking and science at Cambridge University, but not science as a whole.

 

Collection scope

We have interpreted "science" widely to include engineering and communications, but not IT, as that already has a collection. Our collection is arranged according to the standard disciplines such as biology, chemistry, engineering, earth sciences and physics, and then subdivided according to their common divisions, based on the treatment of science in the Universal Decimal Classification.

The collection has a wide range of types of site. We have tried to be fairly exhaustive on active UK science-related blogs, learned societies, charities, pressure groups, and museums. Because of the sheer number of university departments in the UK, we have not been able to cover them all. Instead we have selected the departments that did best in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, and then taken a random sample to make sure that our collection properly reflects the whole world of academic science in the UK. We are also adding science-related Twitter accounts. Social media is generally difficult to archive due to its proprietary nature, but Twitter is open source so we can archive this more easily.

 

Access

Under the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations 2013 we can archive UK websites but we are only able to make them available to people outside the Legal Deposit Libraries Reading Rooms, if the website owner has given permission. Some of the sites in the collection have already had permission granted, such as the Hunterian Society, Dame Athene Donald’s blog, and the Royal College of Anaesthetists. Some others who have not given permission include Science Sparks, the Wellcome Collection, and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. The Web Archive page will tell you whether any archived site is only viewable from a library, anything with no statement can be viewed on the public web.


Get involved

As ever, if you have a site to nominate that has been left out, you can tell us by filling in our public nomination form: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/info/nominate

29 May 2020

Using Webrecorder to archive UK political party leaders' social media after the UK General Election 2019

This blog post is is by Nicola Bingham, Helena Byrne, Carlos Lelkes-Rarugal and Giulia Carla Rossi

Introduction to Webrecorder

The UK Web Archive aims to capture the whole of the UK web space at least once a year, and targeted websites at more frequent intervals. We conduct this activity under the auspices of the Legal Deposit Regulations 2013 which enable us to capture, preserve and make accessible the UK Web for the benefit of researchers now and in the future.

Along with many cultural and heritage institutions that perform at-scale web archiving, we use Heritrix 3, the state of the art crawler developed by the Internet Archive and maintained and improved by an international community of web archiving technologists.

Heritrix copes very well with large scale, bulk crawling but is not optimised for high fidelity crawling of dynamic content, and in particular does not archive social media content very well.

Researchers are increasingly turning their attention to social media as a significant witness to our times, therefore we have a requirement to capture this content, in certain circumstances and in line with our collection development policy. Usually this will be around public events such as General Elections where much of the campaigning over recent years has been played out online and increasingly on social media in particular. 

For this reason we have looked at alternative web archiving tools such as Webrecorder to complement our existing toolset. 

Webrecorder was developed by Ilya Kreymer under the auspices of Rhizome (a non-profit organisation based in New York which commissions, presents and preserves digital art), under its digital preservation program. It offers a browser based version, which offers free accounts up to 5GB storage and a Desktop App

Webrecorder was already well known to us at the UK Web Archive although we had not used it until recently. It is a web archiving service which creates an interactive copy of web pages that the user explores in their browser including content revealed by interactions such as playing video and audio, scrolling, clicking buttons etc. This is a much more sophisticated method of acquisition than that used by Hertrix which essentially only follows HTML links and doesn’t handle dynamic content very well. 


What we planned to do

The UK General Election Campaign ran from the 6th of November 2019 when Parliament was dissolved, until polling day on the 12th of December 2019. On the 13th of December 2019 the UK Web Archive team, based at the British Library attempted to archive various social media accounts of the main political party leaders. Seventeen political leaders from the four home nations were identified and a selection of three social media accounts were targeted: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Not all leaders have accounts on all three platforms, but in total forty four social media accounts were archived. These accounts are identified in the table below by an X. 

List of UK political political part leaders' social media accounts archived
Image credit: Carlos Lelkes-Rarugal

 

 

How we did it

On the 13th of December, 2019 we ran the Webrecorder Desktop App across twelve office PCs. Many were running the Webrecorder Autopilot function over the accounts, but we had mixed success, in that not all accounts captured the same amount of data. As the Autopilot functionality didn’t work well on all accounts, a combination of automated and manual capture processes were used where necessary. It took the team a lot longer than expected to archive the accounts therefore some were archived on a range of dates the following week.    

 

Large political party’s vs smaller party’s social media accounts

The two largest political party leaders, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson, have many more social media followers than the other home nations party leaders. This meant that it was more difficult to get a comprehensive capture of Corbyn and Johnson’s Twitter accounts than, for example, Arlene Foster’s. The more popular Twitter accounts took many hours to crawl; Corbyn’s took almost ten hours to archive thirteen day’s worth of Tweets (which only took us up to 1st December). 

 

Technical Issues

We experienced several technical issues with crawling, mainly concerned with issues around  IP addresses, the app crashing, and Autopilot working on some computers and not others. It was hard to get the app restarted after it crashed, so some time was lost when this happened. Different computers with the same specs ran differently. The Autopilot capture for Jeremy Corbyn’s and Boris Johnson’s Twitter accounts were started at the same time but Corbyn’s ran uninterrupted while Johnson’s crashed when it reached 475 MB. Although Corbyn’s account was crawled for nearly ten hours it only collected 93 MB of data. In contrast, Nigel Farage’s Twitter page was crawled for over four hours and only produced 506 MB. It is important to check the size of crawled data, as the hours the Webrecorder Desktop App is running on Autopilot does not necessarily translate into a high fidelity crawl. 

 

Added complications when using multiple devices with the same user profile:

Complications arose mainly from the auditing and collating of WARC files; performing QA and keeping track of which jobs were successful and those that were not. 

Initially, all participants in this project had planned to use their own work PC or work laptop and a local desktop installation of Webrecorder. However, an hour or so into the process(early in the day), it soon became apparent that there would not be enough time to archive all of the social media accounts within our time frame, given the volume of social media accounts and the unanticipated time it would take to archive each one. For example, it took one instance of a desktop Webrecorder application almost ten hours to archive Jeremy Corbyn’s Twitter account (only able to capture Tweets up to a month prior to the day of archiving).

It was then decided that we could potentially, and experimentally, run multiple parallel Webrecorder applications across a number of office desktop PCs; PCs that were free and available for us to use. This was possible because of the IT Architecture in place, allowing users to log into any office machine with the correct credentials and making their personal desktop load up along with all their files and user settings, regardless of the PC they log into. 

The British Library’s IT system, which incorporates a lot of the Windows ecosystem, gives each user their own dedicated central work directory where they are given a virtual hard drive and  their own storage space for all their documents and any other work related files. This allowed one user to be logged into several office PCs at the same time and therefore run a separate desktop Webrecorder application running on each machine. This was indeed very helpful as it allowed each machine to focus on one particular social media account, which in many cases took hours to archive. 

Having multiple Webrecorder jobs greatly increased our capacity to archive by removing the previous bottleneck, that was, one webrecorder job per user. Instead, this was increased to several webrecorder jobs per user.

Work flow of gathering WARC files from Webrecorder
Image credit: Carlos Lelkes-Rarugal

 

 

Having multiple Webrecorder jobs added complications down the line, not necessarily impacting the archiving process, but rather, complicating the auditing and collating of WARC files. When a user had several Webrecorder jobs running concurrently, each job would still be downloading to the same user work directory (the user’s virtual hard drive). So if a user had many parallel jobs running, this would create multiple WARC files in the same folder (but with different names, so no clashes), WARC files being produced by the different desktop PC that the user had logged in to. This was quite an elaborate setup because once a job had completed, the entire contents of the Webrecrder folder (where the WARCs were stored) was copied to a USB so that an initial Quality Assurance (QA) could be performed on the completed job on a more capable laptop. The difficulty was in finding the WARC file that corresponded to the completed job, which was somewhat convoluted as there would have been multiple WARC files with this type of file-naming convention:

 “rec-20191213100335021576-DESKTOP-AOCGH38-7B5SEXKS.warc.gz”. 

As you can imagine, taking a copy of Webrecorder’s folder contents not only has the completed job, but also the instances of other WARC files from other incomplete jobs. Coupled with multiple jobs per PC, and multiple PCs per user; keeping track of what had completed and which WARCs were either corrupted or not up to standard, was quite demanding. 

 


Review of the data collected 

File size of data collected from UK political party leaders' social media accounts
Image credit: Carlos Lelkes-Rarugal

 

How to access this data

The archived social media accounts can be accessed through the UK General Election 2019 collection in a UK Legal Deposit Library Reading Room. The UK Legal Deposit Libraries are the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Dublin Library.  

The 2019 collection is part of a time series of UK General Elections dating from 2005. They can be accessed over the Internet on the Topics and Themes page of the UK Web Archive website. All the party leaders' social media accounts are tagged into the subsection UK Party Leaders Social Media Accounts (access to individual websites depends on whether we have an additional permission to allow ‘open’ access). More information about what is included in the UK General Election 2019 collection is available through the UK Web Archive blog

 

Conclusion


Overall, undertaking this experiment was an interesting experience for our small team of British Library Web Archive Curators. Many valuable lessons were learnt on how best to utilise Webrecorder in our current practice. The major takeaway was that it was a lot more time consuming than we expected. Instead of taking up one working day, it took nearly a whole week to archive our targeted social media accounts with Webrecorder. Our usual practise is to archive social media accounts with the Heritrix crawler, which works reasonably well with Twitter but is less suited to capturing other platforms. For a long time, we were unable to capture any Facebook content with Heritrix, mainly due to the platform’s publishing model, however the way the platform is published has changed recently allowing us limited success. Archiving social media will always remain challenging for the UK Web Archive, for myriad technical, ethical and legal reasons. The sheer scale of the UK’s social media output is too large for us to capture adequately (and indeed, this may not even be desirable) and certainly too large a task for us to tackle with manual, high fidelity tools such as Webrecorder. However, our recent experience during the 2019 UK General Election has convinced us that using Webrecorder to capture significant events is a worthwhile exercise, as long as we target selected, in scope accounts on a case by case basis. 

 

22 September 2016

Web Archiving Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games

‘For the Olympics, the whole world is captivated, turns on its television and supports their country’

Introduction
The Olympic and Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil may be over but it will be some time before they are forgotten about in the press and social media. Web archives play a vital role in preserving the narratives that have come out of these Games. The Content Development Group (CDG) at the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) has been archiving both the Winter and Summer Games since 2010 and the Rio 2016 Collection will be available in October 2016.

Rio-world-map

Rio 2016 is the first time the CDG has archived events both on and off the playing field making this its biggest collection so far in terms of the number of nominations and geographical coverage. The CDG also enlisted the help of subject experts as well as the general public to nominate sites from countries not usually covered in IIPC collections. As the IIPC only has members in around 33 countries public nominations played an important role in filling this void.

What’s involved?
But what’s involved in web archiving the Olympics? CDG members the British Library and the National Library of Scotland co-hosted a Twitter chat on 10th August 2016 to give an insight on what’s involved. The Twitter chat was based on set questions published in an IIPC blog post with a Q&A session and some time for live nominations. This was an international chat with participants from the USA, Ireland, England, Scotland, Serbia and even Australia. The chat was added to Storify as well as the final archived collection of the Games. Even though the chat was small it helped us to connect with a wider audience and increase the number of public nominations. You can follow updates on this project on Twitter by using the collection hashtag #Rio2016WA.

How can you get involved?
There is still time for you to get involved in web archiving the Olympics and Paralympics. The public nomination form will be open till 23rd September 2016. If you would like to make a nomination you can follow these guidelines. As Carly Lloyd stated above the whole world is captivated by the Olympics now is your opportunity to be part of it.

By Helena Byrne, Assistant Web Archivist, The British Library

17 May 2016

Saving BBC Recipes Website

There's been much coverage today of plans to remove the recipe pages from the BBC website.

6018503713_573fccc22a_z

The UK Web Archive has been collecting selected pages from the BBC, mainly news, for over ten years and since 2013 we have attempted to capture the entirety of the BBC web estate. A small number of pages are available on the Open UK Web Archive website. Most of the BBC's online presence, however, is only available in the reading rooms of UK Legal Deposit libraries, including both of the British Library sites at St. Pancras and Boston Spa in Yorkshire.

We have today instigated a further crawl of the BBC website with the specific aim of ensuring that we save the recipes from the food pages. We can also report that the Internet Archive, Library of Alexandria and the National Library of Iceland have also captured these pages so their future is assured.

Polly Russell, British Library Curator and Food Historian says 

"Cookery books, like cookery websites, obviously serve a practical purpose but that is not all. For historians, sociologists and anthropologists they also tell us about people's culinary aspirations and anxieties, cultural tastes and trends, dietary preoccupations, social expectations and economic conditions. They are, therefore, a rich source for researchers. So while it's sad news to hear about plans to close the much trusted and well-loved BBC Food website, it's a relief that the British Library is going to be able to archive the website for posterity."