By Charlotte McMillan, Founder, Storychest

Introduction from Nicola Bingham, Lead Curator, Web Archiving, British Library

Today is World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD), a celebration of all things digital preservation which is organised by the Digital Preservation Coalition and held annually on the first Thursday of November.

To mark today’s WDPD, the UK Web Archive is highlighting the ‘Children of Lockdown’ project, a recent addition to the Archive which exemplifies the diversity of voices captured in the Archive and highlights the importance of preserving our digital legacy.

Charlotte McMillan, founder of Storychest and curator of the ‘Children of Lockdown’ project writes:

“Lockdown has been like a question mark in the middle of a sentence. Unexpected, confusing and stressful”, observes Yilu, 14, from London, in one of 200 thoughtful and powerful responses to lockdown and Covid19 from children aged 3 to 17, spanning the whole of United Kingdom and from as far afield as Australia.

In July this year, children were asked to contribute to a ‘digital time capsule’ to be included by the British Library in the UK Web Archive’s Covid19 collection. The resulting group of stories, poems and artwork, is insightful and poignant, and whilst it reflects anxiety and, in some cases, profound sadness, it is also imbued with humour, imagination and enduring hope. Disruption to education, distancing from friends and family and uncertainty about the future, are themes which have been captured through the lenses and with the clarity of the voices of the children themselves, a generation whose lives have been affected by the pandemic in so many ways.

The ‘Children of Lockdown’ collection was initiated by Charlotte McMillan, mother of 3 boys and founder of Storychest, the private digital memory box app. Witnessing the impact of the upheaval of lockdown restrictions, she encouraged her own children to record their impressions of this unprecedented period of time.

Charlotte studied history at university and remembers the amazement she felt at exploring on microfiche newspaper articles stored by the British Library from a century ago to help her to understand how events were perceived contemporaneously. She wanted to enable today’s children to record their thoughts and impressions in a lasting way, to help future generations to understand what they were going through. So, Charlotte, together with a group of 5 British children’s authors put the word out to schools and other groups for children’s submissions.

The children have captured enduring and iconic snapshots like the ‘clap for carers’, PE with Joe Wicks, the run on loo paper, empty streets and the emergence of nature, including goats taking over Llandudno.

Maddy, 15, from London drew herself in monochrome, with the now all too familiar accessory of a mask, eyes peering knowingly at the viewer.

Tiggy, 10, from Kent felt trapped and isolated away from her friends, so drew herself behind prison bars in her own home, but added hope to her work by overlaying a rainbow in pastels.

Charlotte’s son Sholto, 14, pictured himself caught inside his phone, referencing the use of devices in lockdown as both a window to the outside world and a trap.

There are stories of imagination and escapism: Flora, 10, from Wallingford likened the virus to a wandering wolf ‘pacing the fence line’ outside her home; Joseph, 8, from Nottingham, missing playing football, invented games using Lego, “Harry Potter, racing through on his broomstick to smash it in the goal. Godzilla in goal, nobody could beat him”.

Incredibly brave Emma, 11, from Derbyshire, was being treated for a brain tumour during lockdown. She reflected on happy moments sat on a best friend’s drive for a chat and also describes sadness that her mum was not able to be with her, due to the restrictions, when she rang the hospital bell to mark the end of her treatment.

Siomha, 11, from London grieves for the death of a beloved great uncle, who had been known as the ‘baby whisperer’ for his calming effect on her as a baby: “Where is my baby whisperer? This time he cannot stop the tears, because this time I weep for him.”

And yet, through it all, there is hope. Maddy, 15, from Exeter, creates a lockdown mural in her bedroom to show hope for her family and friends. Saanvi, 11, from Leamington Spa, remembering Dumbledore’s words “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light”, reflects that “mankind will get through any crisis and discover positivity even where it seems impossible to find”.

Kenzi, 12, from Chesterfield who is autistic and found lockdown to be a particularly anxious time, sums it up beautifully, in his poem ‘Life in Lockdown’:

When normality returns

2020 will be remembered

In our broken battered hearts

As the time the world finally united

By staying apart

The Children of Lockdown collection can be viewed in full at https://childrenoflockdown.storychest.com/

The UK Web Archive Coronavirus Collection can be viewed here: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/2975

By Hannah Connell, Collaborative PhD Student, King’s College London; British Library

 

I spoke about my position as a curator for the Russia in the UK curated collection as part of the recent Engaging with Web Archives conference (EWA), which was held online from the 21^st-22^nd of September 2020. This conference reflected the breadth of the web archiving community, bringing together speakers from researchers to librarians, as well as curators and web archiving teams from many different countries.

As always, it was inspiring to participate in such a welcoming event. Even online, the conference retained the collaborative atmosphere which has marked my experience of research in web archiving, allowing new researchers to interact with more experienced practitioners and encouraging questions and conversations between researchers, users and archivists.

The researcher-curated collection, Russia in the UK, is part of the UK Web Archive (UKWA). I was particularly pleased to have had the opportunity to present this curated collection, a resource on the Russian-speaking community in the UK, which was first started in November 2017. Such collections play an important role in making the wide range of material preserved in the UKWA more visible to researchers.

Curators are important to the preservation work of the UKWA. Curated collections are collected manually by curators and researchers with specialist knowledge in their field. The role of a curator in creating a UKWA collection involves identifying relevant websites to be included in a collection, and recording the metadata for these websites, including the translation and transliteration of titles and descriptions in other languages.

This collection is valuable both as a resource for further research, and as a means of questioning research practices. It is not possible to capture everything on the web, and collection curators ensure that a representative sample of websites for each thematic collection are selected. The practice of creating and maintaining a collection such as the Russia in the UK  ultimately influences the shape of the collection and the online representation of the diasporic community it will come to reflect. As such, it is important for researchers and users to understand the decisions taken by curators in selecting and capturing websites.

My paper for EWA focused on the creation of a curation guide for curators of new curated collections. This  draws on the ongoing process of curating the Russia in the UK collection, documenting both the provenance of this special collection and reflecting on this process as a model for future collections.  

In documenting the creation of this collection, I hope to enable future researchers to explore and contribute to this record of the online activity of the Russian diaspora in the UK, and to question and develop the curatorial and research practices behind the curation of collections.

You can watch Hannah Connell’s presentation on the EWA YouTube channel.

 

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

In July 2020 the British Library, the UK Web Archive and CILIP LGBTQ+ Network relaunched the LGBTQ+ Lives Online web archive collection. We have received many nominations for new sites to be collected by the UK Web Archive and work has begun to re-tag many of the websites that have been collected since the UK Web Archive began collecting the UK web in 2005.

To mark two months since the project began, LGBTQ+ Lives Online leads Steven Dryden, of the British Library, and Ash Green, of CILIP LGBTQ+ Network write about the relevance of the World Wide Web to them as members of the LGBTQ+ community, and some of their collection highlights:

 

Steven he/him/his

Steven Dryden

I first encountered the internet in Las Vegas. It was the summer of 1998, I was 17 and my family had migrated from Newcastle Upon Tyne to the western world’s party play pit in the Nevada desert. My friend, Lilian, was talking to someone in New York City about the band Depeche Mode through America Online (AOL).

Chat rooms were online spaces that allowed groups of people to join anonymously and had the options to talk and interact within a group or in private. Chatrooms quickly became a pivotal part of my small cohort of friends and I, the odd balls who didn’t quite fit, as we were forming our identities in those formative late teen years, and trying to find our place in the world.

Later the same year on October 12, 1998 Matthew Shepard would die. A gay student at the University of Wyoming, Shepherd was beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on the night of October 6, 1998. AOL chatrooms formed the major part of how I found out about Shepherd, worked through my feelings about his murder, and was the first news story that I followed online.

The protections and general understanding of who the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community are has undergone radical change in the 22 years since I first encountered the internet. I’m interested to see what survives online of the change in language relating to the community, and what evidence remains in the UK Web Archive of the online discussion. Some websites that interest me in these first months of the project include:

• The Campaign for Homosexual Equality: an organisation which led the way to legal reform in the UK, following the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which partial decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales.

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/20130505124828/http://www.c-h-e.org.uk/

• Around the Toilet: a community engaged art project exploring the accessibility and culture of toilets for the LGBTQ+ community

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/20180606164959/https://aroundthetoilet.wordpress.com/

• Asexual Visibility and Education Network: founded in 2001 with two distinct goals: creating public acceptance and discussion of asexuality and facilitating the growth of an asexual community

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/20150226230020/http://www.asexuality.org/home/

 

Ash (they/them)

Ash Green

When I was studying for my BA Information and Library Management degree in the early 1990s, the internet and World Wide Web weren’t as high profile as they are now. I loved tech back then, and was into programming and creating databases as part of the degree. But I didn’t really understand what the lecturers were talking about when they mentioned the internet. At the time I had no idea how important it would be to my coming out just over 20 years later, and what a positive impact it would have.

Thinking about the lead up to my coming out in 2017, without access to sites and forums related to trans/gender non-conforming lives in particular, I doubt I would have come out at all. But when I decided to look for guidance online, I found a huge amount of information that was overwhelming at first, but eventually this helped me understood where I fitted into the world. They included medical sites; statements from WHO and other health organisations highlighting that being trans wasn’t a mental health issue; personal blogs and forums, talking about experiences and a variety of perspectives on what it means to be trans; finding out about non-binary, genderfluid, and genderqueer people experiences (I had no idea what these words meant); LGBTQ+ events; makeup and style tips; sites for face-to-face support groups and meetups, and sites for exhibitions such as the Museum of Transology and the Transworkers photography exhibition, which helped me understand that being trans is much broader than mainstream media would have the world believe.

Many sites were useful, but at the same time I came across quite a few that were more "Yes, this miracle herbal treatment really does change your hormones", and "You're only valid if you fit into trans box X or Y" that put my critical, digital literacy and research experience into practice. I also found supportive friends and allies, and I was able to share useful sites and sources of information I’d discovered to give them a better understanding of my experience. It’s important that these sites should be a part of the UK Web Archive LGBTQ+ Lives Online collection. Not only because they have a relevance to the UK Web Archive in general, but from a personal perspective I feel that if they had such an impact on helping me find where I fit into the world, how many other people have they also had a similar positive impact upon?

The sites I’ve chosen below from the UK Web Archive have all had a personal impact upon myself.

• Museum of Transology: The UK’s most significant collection of objects representing trans, non-binary and intersex people’s lives. 

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/20201003091027/https://www.museumoftransology.com/

• OutStories Bristol: Collecting and preserving the social history and recollections of LGBT+ people living in or associated with Bristol, England.

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/10000101000000/https://outstoriesbristol.org.uk/

• Outline Surrey: Outline provides support to people with their sexuality and gender identity, including but not limited to the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and trans community of Surrey, primarily through a helpline, website and support groups.

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/20160107134238/http://www.outlinesurrey.org/

 

Get involved with preserving UK LGBTQ+ Lives Online with the UK Web Archive

We can’t curate the whole of the UK web on our own, we need your help to ensure that information, discussions, personal experiences and creative outputs related to the LGBTQ+ community are preserved for future generations. Anyone can suggest UK published websites to be included in the UK Web Archive by filling in our nominations form:

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/nominate

 

By Dr. Peter Webster, Independent Scholar, Historian and Consultant

 

The historian of the late 1990s has a problem. The vast bulk of content from the period is no longer on the live web; there are few, if any, indications of what has been lost – no inventory of the 1990s web against which to check. Of the content that was captured by the Internet Archive (more or less the only archive of the Anglophone web of the period), only a superficial layer is exposed to full-text search, and the bulk may only be retrieved by a search for the URL. We do not know what was never archived, and in the archive it is difficult to find what we might want, since there is no means of knowing the URL of a lost resource. Sometimes we need, then, to understand the archived web using only the technical data about itself that it can be made to disclose.

Niels Brügger has defined a web sphere as ‘web material … related to a topic, a theme, an event or a geographic area’.  My paper at the EWA conference presents a method of reconstructing a web sphere, much of which is lost from the live web and exists only in the Internet Archive: the web estate of the many conservative Christian campaign groups in the UK in the 1990s and early 2000s.

This method of web sphere reconstruction is based not on page content but on the relationships between sites, i.e., the web of hyperlinks. The method is iterative, and tracks back and forth between big data and small. Individual archived pages and directories, printed sources, the scholarly record itself, and even traces of previous unsuccessful attempts at web archiving come into play, as does a large dataset held by the British Library. From the more than 2 billion lines in the UK Host Link Graph dataset it is possible to extract the outlines of this particular web sphere.

You can watch Peter Webster’s presentation on his website peterwebster.me. 

 

Previous studies using a similar method are: 

Webster, Peter. 2019. Lessons from cross-border religion in the Northern Irish web sphere: understanding the limitations of the ccTLD as a proxy for the national web. In The Historical Web and Digital Humanities: the Case of National Web domains, eds Niels Brügger & Ditte Laursen, 110-23. London: Routledge.  http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/yms5-9v95     

Webster, Peter. 2017. Religious discourse in the archived web: Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, and the sharia law controversy of 2008. In: The Web as History, eds Niels Brügger & Ralph Schroeder, 190-203. London: UCL Press. (Available Open Access at:  https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/84010)

 

By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives at the British Library

Creepy crawlers - British Library digitised image from page 79 of "The Child's Book of Poetry. A selection of poems, ballads and hymns"

 

Halloween and the UK Web Archive

From the start of October all the shops and supermarkets were filling up with Halloween costumes, decorations and lots of fun sized confectionery that are easy to share with some of the trick-o-treaters who might be knocking on your door. It is not clear yet how the coronavirus pandemic will impact any of the informal celebrations that take place every year. No doubt the UK Web Archive crawlers are picking up lots of Halloween and 5th of November themed webpages as part of the 2020 Domain Crawl.

Halloween in the UK is often perceived to be a cultural import from North America. A YouGov poll in 2019 showed that only 30% of people surveyed were planning to celebrate the occasion. This Shine graph shows how the popularity of the term on the archived .uk web has increased in popularity over time. 

Click on a point in the graph to see a sample of how the phrase is used.

 

 

Halloween History

The tradition of Halloween actually goes back centuries and was widely celebrated by people in Ireland, Britain and northern France. During pagan times, the 1st of November was officially the start of winter, this season was  associated with death as the crops, wildlife and many people died due to the cold and lack of sunlight during this period. Because of this day’s association with death, it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth on the night of the 31st October. It was during the Reformation that the tradition of celebrating Halloween died out in Britain, especially in England. 

A recent YouGov poll has shown that Guy Fawkes Night is more popular in Great Britain than Halloween. 

 

The 5th of November

The commemoration on the 5th of November goes by many names, traditionally it was Guy Fawkes Night but is sometimes referred to as Bonfire Night or Fireworks Night. But there seems to be some regional differences in what term is used and how the night is celebrated. 

What do you call this commemoration?

This is a question we visited back in 2017 and as you can see in the Shine graph in more recent years the term Bonfire Night was used more widely on the archived .uk web. 

 

 

Get creative with Halloween at the British Library

Our Assistant Web Archivist, Carlos Lelkes-Rarugal, has designed some short animated videos using recordings from the British Library Sound Archive and images from the Ghosts & Ghoulish Scenes, British Library Flickr. See these on the UK Web Archive, Digital Scholarship and the Sound Archive’s Wildlife Department Twitter accounts.

This and other sounds can be experienced in the Sound Archive at the British Library which has over 260,000 wildlife sound recordings from all over the world. You can hear a selection of some of these recordings on the British Library, Sound & Vision blog, the latest blog post Going Batty for Halloween, gives an overview of the history of bats and Halloween. 

The Digital Scholarship’s latest blog post, Mind Your Paws and Claws, encourages you to use these images and sounds for various creative projects. The Ghosts & Ghoulish Scenes Flickr Album was previously used in the Gothic Off the Map competition. 

 

Get involved with preserving the UK web

The UK Web Archive aims to archive, preserve and give access to the historic UK web space. We endeavour to include important aspects of British culture and events that shape society. 

Anyone can suggest UK websites to be included in the UK Web Archive by filling in our nominations form: www.webarchive.org.uk/nominate 

We have a Festivals collection, but are there any local Halloween or 5th of November events near you that haven’t been added yet? Equally, if these events have now been cancelled, we would like to add some of these online cancellation notifications to our collection Coronavirus (COVID-19) UK. Browse through what we have so far and please nominate more content!

 

By Rosita Murchan, Web Archivist, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI)

Screenshot of the PRONI Web Archive homepage

 

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) Web Archive has been building its collection of websites for almost ten years, focusing initially on capturing the websites of our Government departments and local councils but also websites deemed historically or culturally important to Northern Ireland.

Our collection has grown in both size and scope and we now have over 240 captured sites that range from Instagram and twitter feeds to local history group pages to significant inquest sites with one terabyte of data being captured each year.

Unlike the rest of UK where legal deposit libraries are entitled to copy published material from the internet under the 2013 Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations (NPLD),  PRONI has no legal deposit status and rather works on a permissions based approach where we write to website owners informing them of our intention to archive their website and then operate on a ‘silence is consent’ approach crawling a site anyway and taking down websites should the owner request it. 

In an attempt to continue to expand our collection we have been very lucky to have been invited to collaborate with the UK Web Archive team based at the British Library on some of their projects in the last year and have added a Northern Ireland perspective on the topics of Brexit and the General Election 2019 and more recently a NI Covid-19 viewpoint.

Part and parcel of this collaboration included us getting access to and being able to use and add to the UK Web Archive ACT Web Archiving tool. For me this was a great opportunity to see and use another web archiving tool, especially a custom piece of software for an institution as reputable as the British Library and it has been a fantastic opportunity for us to archive sites that would normally be outside our remit, as a result we have been able to add to further research for Northern Ireland.

We really hope to continue this partnership with the British library going forward, not only as a method of increasing the amount of NI archived sites but also as a way to continue to improve and learn from their expertise.

You can watch Rosita Murchan’s presentation on the EWA YouTube Channel.

 

By Brendan Power, Digital Preservation Librarian, Library of Trinity College Dublin

At the recent conference, ‘Engaging with Web Archives: Opportunities, Challenges and Potentialities’, I presented a paper on a collaborative project between The Library of Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin, the Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, and the British Library. The project was carried out in 2015/16 and aimed to identify, collect, and preserve online resources related to the 1916 Easter Rising and the diverse ways it was commemorated and engaged with throughout its centenary in 2016. The Bodleian Libraries primarily collected UK websites under the provisions of the 2013 Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations (NPLD), while The Library of Trinity College Dublin focused on websites in the .ie domain. Since no legislation exists in the Republic of Ireland to ensure that the .ie domain is preserved, websites within the .ie domain were collected on a voluntary basis, that is, with the express formal permission of the website owners through the signing of a license agreement.

 

We aimed to reflect the variety of ways that the Irish and British states, cultural and educational institutions, as well as communities and individuals, approached the centenary events. These included official commemorative websites, the websites of museums, archives, heritage, cultural, and education institutions, along with traditional and alternative news media websites, blogs, and community websites. These resources will be invaluable primary resources to analyse how people interpreted and engaged with the Easter Rising in its centenary year. Researchers have reflected on the events organised on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966 and how these events were framed, the aspects that were championed, and the critical viewpoints denied expression. In a similar way, the records created throughout the centenary will be an essential resource for researchers in analysing how the generations of 2016 engaged with the legacy of the Easter Rising and the approaches, themes, and tone adopted.

 

The resulting web archive collection contains over 318 seeds, i.e. websites or sub-sections of these. Of these 318 websites, 112 (35%) were selected by The Library of Trinity College Dublin, 190 (60%) by the Bodleian Libraries, and 16 (5%) by curators at the British Library. 118 (37%) of the websites were from the .ie domain, 172 (54%) were from the .uk domain and 28 (9%) were associated with other areas, predominantly the USA. For all websites outside the UK (146), formal permission was sought from the website owners, resulting in 61 licenses to archive and make the archived copies publicly available. We received no response from 83 website owners, and 2 organisations agreed in principle to inclusion in the web archive but were not in a position to sign the license agreement required to allow us to archive the website as they could not affirm that they controlled the copyright of all the content that was to be archived. This meant an overall permissions rate of 42%, with the rate for websites in the .ie domain being even higher, at 51%.

 

Since the project was completed there have been many helpful reminders of the impact that such work has. This included one organisation that had created a website dedicated to an Easter Rising project which was no longer live on the web. The person that was responsible for the website had left the organisation and their replacement had no access to the materials that had been on the website. They had discovered an e-mail from me back in 2016 inviting them to participate in the web archive. Once they contacted me, I was able to direct them to the UK web archive and, as the organisation had signed the license agreement, they were able to access the archived website immediately from their office. This access had saved them both the time and staff resources that would have been expended in order to recreate some of the resources that were available on the archived website. It serves as an example of what embedding sustainability into a project can save in terms of time and staff resources and demonstrated the positive economic impact that organisations can derive by participation in cultural heritage initiatives such as web archives.

 

The co-curators of this collection have also previously published a paper on the collection in the academic journal, Internet Histories called Capturing commemoration: the 1916 Easter Rising web archive project.

You can watch Brendan Power’s presentation on the EWA YouTube Channel.

 

By Robert McNicol, Kenneth Ritchie Wimbledon Library, Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum

 

 

Opened in 1977, the Kenneth Ritchie Wimbledon Library, part of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum, is the most comprehensive collection of tennis publications in the world. We hold books, periodicals, programmes and other publications from more than 90 different countries.

As with everything at Wimbledon, we are always looking for ways to evolve and improve how we do things. That’s why we were delighted to team up with the UK Web Archive to put together a curated collection of tennis websites. The Tennis collection sits within the Sports Collection (Ball Sports Excluding Football) section of the UK Web Archive Sports Collection.

So far, we have added over 70 sites to the Tennis collection but ultimately the aim is to archive all UK-based tennis websites. This includes websites of tennis clubs, governing bodies and media, as well as the websites and social media feeds of individual players. We have already added the Twitter feeds of all world-ranked British players to the collection.

Social media archiving is an area we are particularly interested in and we have been experimenting with using Webrecorder to archive social media feeds to a level not possible on the UK Web Archive. We have recently conducted several trials, using both the manual and auto-pilot functions of Webrecorder to archive the Wimbledon Twitter and Instagram feeds. We have had mixed results from these pilot projects and would be interested in comparing notes with any other organisations that have used Webrecorder to perform social media archiving.

As well as social media feeds, we have been using Webrecorder to archive our own website, Wimbledon.com, which, as a particularly dynamic website, the UK Web Archive struggles to capture fully. Wimbledon.com is this year celebrating its 25^th anniversary and by archiving it regularly we will be able to save the information contained in it for researchers of future generations. In the same way, we have also been trialling the archiving of our AELTC Intranet site, Wimbledon Insider.

We’ve greatly enjoyed our collaboration with the UK Web Archive so far and are very grateful for the web archiving advice that they have provided. We hope that our tennis expertise has also been of benefit to the UK Web Archive and the British Library. We look forward to working together for many years to come.

If you would like to nominate a tennis website to be archived, please fill in the public nomination form on the UK Web Archive website or get in touch with me at [email protected], we’d love to hear from you.

You can watch Robert McNicol’s presentation on the EWA YouTube Channel.