By Helena Byrne, Curator of Web Archives, The British Library

Hedley Sutton is the Team Leader, Asian & African Studies Reference Services at the British Library. He joined the Library as a cataloguer in what was then called the Bibliographic Services Division in 1982. Early in 1988 he moved to the India Office Library and Records Section (later renamed the Oriental & India Office Collections … then Asia, Pacific & Africa Collections … and now Asian & African Studies) as Serials and Acquisitions Librarian, before taking up his current role in the Reference Enquiry team in 1999.

 In a previous blog post (2014) Hedley stated that:

“A Reference Team Leader spends most of their day answering queries sent in by e-mail, fax and letter or manning Reading Room enquiry desks. Some, however, also help with contributing to the selection of sites for inclusion in the UK Web Archive.”

In 2008, Hedley started to select websites for the web archive team and to date has selected over 6,000 targets. His initial focus was on UK published websites related to his own specialism of Asian and African studies, however he soon turned to selecting websites on a wide variety of topics that will be of interest to future researchers.

In Hedley’s free time, he likes to write limericks and when he started to come across websites that covered interesting niche subject areas he was inspired to write a series of blogs called If Websites Could Talk. In the first blog post (2016), Hedley brings many of the websites to life as they discuss amongst themselves “to which might be regarded as the most fantastic and extraordinary site of all”. In the second blog post (2017), the websites talked about “which one has the best claim to be recognized as the most extraordinary”. After a long break, the third blog post (2020), also tries to determine which website is the most extraordinary site of all.

You can view archived versions of the websites that Hedley has selected by searching on the UK Web Archive website: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/   

If you know of a website that you feel should be in the UK Web Archive, please nominate it.

By Hedley Sutton, Team Leader, Asian & African Studies Reference Services

After a long gap of time, we are back eavesdropping on a conversation among U.K. domain websites as they try and decide which of their number should be recognized as the most extraordinary site of all.

“Who would like to begin?” said the Museum of Fenland Drainage. “Perhaps you, Catholic Association of Performing Arts?”

“If you’re going to get all religious, then I think we should be considered,” said the Equinox Pilgrimage of the Glastonbury Zodiac.

“Religions are merely derelict husks of an impoverished intellectual paradigm,” mused the UK Sartre Society. “We’d be far more inclined to nominate a site encapsulating the essential shallowness of contemporary culture.”

“Such as … us, perhaps?” chipped in Desperate Optimists.

“Rubbish!” cried Primal Bushcraft & Survival. “We want a site that’s rugged and tough!”

“Then you surely mean us,” said Adrenalin Addicts. “We’re much tougher than you!”

“Now now, just calm down,” said the Challenging Behaviour Foundation soothingly. “Why don’t you two make up and have a little chat with the Balloon and Party Professionals Association? If you don’t, we may need to use the services of Action for Happiness. Or in the worst case scenario, the British Pain Society. ”

“If you are lucky, you might make the British Blacklist."

“How about a song?” chuckled the *Falmouth Fish Sea Shanty Collective*. We’d now like to entertain you all with a duet with our dear friends the Cornish Sardine Management Association. The National Federation of Fishmongers may like to join in too.”

“Fish doesn’t seem to agree with us,” said the UK Men’s Sheds Association, changing the subject. “We usually find we have to go running to the Association of Registered Colon Hydrotherapists.”

In the background the Apostrophe Protection Society could be seen, mouthing the words “Thank you.”

“Keep still!” pleaded the Big Wasp Survey. “I think I see one. Look out, Flea Circus Research Library, it’s heading your way!”

“We’re getting off the point,” sighed the Pylon Appreciation Society. “A sing song or an insect hunt aren’t going to help us decide.”

With time running out, they eventually decided that the best qualified candidate site would be … Perfect Information.

Also see:

If websites could talk

If websites could talk (again) 

 

By Caio Mello, Doctoral Researcher at the School of Advanced Study, University of London

The Olympic Games happen every four years. This means that every four years a city has to be chosen as a host city. It is easy to think about the impact of hosting such a big event in your own country. Usually governments have to prepare everything for their guests and be aware that the local population is expecting something that will remain as a legacy after the event ends. But what are people actually expecting? What usually happens after the Olympics? Are people happy or unhappy with the legacy left behind with the end of the games? We can try to answer these questions by reading what was published on the internet before, during and after the games in these countries that have hosted the Olympics.

This project will be looking at the media coverage of the two most recent Olympics that took place in London (2012) and Rio (2016). Our main goal is to detect the kind of legacy that had been covered by the media and also the sentiments behind the articles, considering how they had changed over time. This analysis will provide us with insights about what sort of legacy people usually expect and what are their feelings when they face the materialization of their plans some years later. This kind of research has many possible applications. It can help governments to plan better public policies as well as provide us with tools to understand the impacts of such big events, what can be used to find solutions.

What do we mean by Olympic Legacy?
Despite being an important pillar of the Olympic Movement and also regularly brought up to justify cities – and nations – participation in the event, the concept of legacy is not very clear and has still been requiring some effort of scholars and members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to determine – or even get closer of – what it exactly means. Legacy can be basically understood here as being all the results generated by the event.

Among the most recognizable legacies of Olympic Games are the sports infrastructure - such as new stadiums and training venues – and the urban planning – which involves many aspects such as new residential areas and new transportation infrastructure, for instance. But it is not reducible to material – or “hard” – legacy. There are also many abstract/immaterial legacies that can be called as soft legacies. As an example it is possible to mention the national self-confidence, production of new ideas, popular memory and additional know-how.

It is important to point out that legacy does not have to be positive, although most of the time it is used in positive contexts. There are possible negative legacies such as debts from planning or construction and infrastructure that is not needed after the event.

This research is part of the CLEOPATRA Innovative Training Network and it has been conducted under a PhD developed at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. The project is entitled ‘Nationalism, internationalism and sporting identity: the London and Rio Olympics’. For more information: cleopatra-project.eu/.

By Liam Markey, Collaborative Doctoral Student, University of Liverpool

Mediating Militarism: Chronicling 100 Years of Military Victimhood from Print to Digital, 1918-2018 is an ESRC funded CASE studentship in collaboration with the University of Liverpool and the British Library. The project aims to assess militarism and its role in the commemoration of the British war dead since the end of the First World War.
By taking advantage of unique access to print and digital materials captured and held by the British Library my aim is to chronicle the changing public portrayal of the British war dead from the print to the digital age, evaluating the role this portrayal plays in the mediation of militarism in the process.

What is Militarism?
Militarism, generally defined as the glorifying of war and invasion of the civilian sphere by military ideals, manifests itself in a variety of ways that depend heavily on contemporary politics, alongside both military and social developments. In the case of Britain, national narratives surrounding the First World War have played a key role in the development of the nation’s own form of militarism.

The nature of Britain’s involvement in the First World War meant that following the Armistice of 11th November 1918, a multitude of commemorative practices were developed in order to facilitate the mourning of an entire nation. British soldiers who had died abroad were not repatriated following the war, meaning tangible sites of mourning, such as the Cenotaph in London, were created as focal points of British remembrance. A unique language and symbology surrounding the commemoration of the war dead developed. Fallen soldiers began to be venerated as almost Christ-like figures, and symbols such as the poppy became tangible representations of commemoration, these practices continue into the present day and have saturated British attitudes to the military and the waging of war.

UK Web Archive
How, then, can the UK Web Archive assist in the development of this research project? Websites curated by the archive provide us with a valuable look at how ordinary British people and communities interact with these commemorative practices, and I am interested in looking at how the language and symbols popularised over the past century are reproduced, for example, in amateur websites. One of the big questions I have been asking as I carry out my research is how the First World War leaving living memory has affected the function of these practices.

Using the UK Web Archive to assess the British discourse around those who were killed in the war, be it regarding a family member or a soldier who served in a local regiment, will prove fascinating when interrogating ideas such as the sanitisation and trivialisation of war.

Questions?
Does language steeped in religious rhetoric glorify war, representing the saturation of British commemorative practices with militarism over the past century, or instead are they an insight into the more personal and isolated forms of commemoration distinct from national narratives we are presented with in the media? Does an excessive use of the poppy on both amateur and media websites reflect this potent symbol’s original meaning or has it been hijacked to serve more nationalistic and militaristic purposes?

Materials collected by the UK Web Archive will prove invaluable in answering these questions.

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

Each year we attempt to collect as much of the UK web space as we can. This typically involves millions of websites and billions of individual assets (images, pdf's, css files etc.). We send out our robots across the interwebs looking for websites that we can archive. The bots follow links to pages that have links to follow and it keeps going until we have archived (almost) everything. But what does it look like to 'crawl' the web? Here we have condensed an hour of live web crawling into a one minute video:

Every circle is a different website, and every line represents a link that was followed between websites. The size of the circle represents how many pages we visited from that site, and the width of the line represents the number of links we followed.

If you want to see what we are crawling at the moment, look here (NOTE: this link only works while we are crawling the web): https://jumbled-eggplant.glitch.me/graph.html

You can see what we have captured at our website (www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/), however, many of the sites themselves can only be viewed in the reading rooms of UK Legal Deposit Libraries. 

Despite our best efforts we can't collect every UK owned website as many are hosted abroad and not under a .UK (looking at you wordpress, squarespace and wix). You can nominate a website here: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/info/nominate

By Robert McNicol, Librarian at the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum

The magic of Wimbledon is its ability to preserve its history and tradition while simultaneously embracing the future. When you enter the Grounds of The All England Lawn Tennis Club, you know you’re somewhere special. It’s the spiritual home of the sport and you can feel the history all around you. And yet Wimbledon in 2019 is also a thoroughly modern sporting venue with state-of-the-art facilities for players, spectators, officials and broadcasters. While Wimbledon loves its traditions (the grass courts, the all-white clothing, the strawberries & cream), it has always been looking ahead as well. From the very first Lawn Tennis Championships in 1877, to the introduction of Open tennis in 1968, to the building of roofs on Centre and No.1 Courts. Wimbledon is both the past and the future of tennis.

It’s in this same spirit that the Kenneth Ritchie Wimbledon Library has teamed up with the British Library to curate a collection of tennis websites for the UK web archive. This is a subsection of the much larger Sports Collection on the UK Web Archive Website. Using the latest technology to preserve the past, it’s a project that captures the essence of Wimbledon.

Naturally, one of the first websites we added to the Tennis collection was our own. Wimbledon.com was established in 1995 and is very excited to be celebrating its 25^th anniversary next year.  This project ensures that, in future, researchers will be able to go back and search the contents of the Wimbledon website from previous years. We have also archived some Wimbledon social media feeds, including the Twitter feed of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum, of which the Library is part.

However, the ultimate aim is to archive a complete collection of UK-based tennis websites. This will include sites belonging to governing bodies, clubs, media and individual players. One part of the project already completed is to archive the Twitter feeds of all British players with a world ranking. From Andy Murray and Johanna Konta to Finn Bass and Blu Baker, every British player with a Twitter account has had it saved for posterity!

If you want to hear more about the project, you may be interested in attending Wimbledon’s Tennis History Conference on Saturday 9 November, where Helena Byrne (Curator of Web Archiving at the British Library) will be joining me to do a joint presentation.

And if you’d like to know more about the Wimbledon Library, feel free to get in touch. We’re the world’s biggest and best tennis library, holding thousands of books, periodicals and programmes from more than 90 different countries. We’re open by appointment to anyone with an interest in researching tennis history. https://www.wimbledon.com/en_GB/atoz/library_research_enquiries.html

Finally, if you’d like to nominate a tennis or other sporting websites for us to archive, go to our Save a UK website form: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/info/nominate

By Isobelle Degale, Masters student, University of Sussex

My summer placement at the British Library is now coming to an end. As a Masters student studying Human Rights, I contacted the UK Web Archiving team based at the British Library as a way to enrich my understanding of the sources available on London policing, specifically looking at stop and search procedure.

The first few days of the placement I learnt how to add online content onto the UK Web Archives using the 'Annotation and Curation Tool' (ACT). I learnt how to add 'targets' (web addresses) to the web archive using ACT and the importance of crawl frequency of different sources. Over the last few weeks I have been researching and selecting content to add to the online collections: Black and Asian Britain and Caribbean Communities in the UK.

Having previously studied history, including the impact of the British Empire during my undergraduate degree, I also have an interest in the Windrush generation and have been selecting content such as websites, podcast links, videos and documentaries. I have also gained hands on experience in web archiving through emailing website authors requesting permission for open access  of their content.

As my summer dissertation discusses discrimination and disproportionality of London stop and searches, I have also been adding related content to the UK Web Archive. I have gathered content such as news articles, twitter accounts of activists, grassroots websites and publications from racial equality think tanks that highlight the disproportionality of stop and searches on young BME (Black and Ethnic Minorities) peoples and communities, which is the central debate of this topic. My dissertation specifically explores the experiences and perspectives of those stopped and searched. I have noted that there is a gap on the web which explores and expresses the opinions of those who are more likely to be stopped, despite the abundance of news reports and statistics on the topic.

My experience with the web archiving team has opened up my thoughts to the value of archiving online content, as with the breadth and depth of the web, socially and culturally important web sites can easily be overlooked if not archived.

I hope that my contribution over the weeks will be useful in documenting the cultural and social celebration of black and Asian communities in Britain, but also demonstrating that there are negative experiences of black and ethnic minority Britons that make up an important part of daily life and should not be ignored. As a human rights student I feel that it is important in recognising inequality in both past and present Britain. I am, therefore, grateful to the Web Archiving team for the opportunity to add to the UK Web Archive the much debated topic of London stop and searches that will hopefully provide insight and information into the subject.

Background
Works of Interactive Fiction (IF) are stories that allow the user to guide or affect the narrative by making choices, clicking links or otherwise navigating the text. As part of the 'Emerging Formats project', I’ve been investigating UK Interactive Fiction (IF) in order to help determine potential collecting priorities, and attempting to collect works for the UK Web Archive. This has allowed me to discover who is creating interactive fiction, what kinds are they creating, and what tools they’re using.

As might be expected, IF creators come from a wide variety of backgrounds and create works for a wide variety of reasons. Some create interactive fiction to educate, to experiment with particular IF tools, to create portfolio pieces to support their professional writing and design careers, to sell their work, or simply to share an idea or story. Both the tools used and the approaches to using these tools are extremely diverse, as were the genres and topics covered by the works (see fig 1) However, as I studied the 200+ items found during the course of the project, several recurring themes began to emerge.

Themes
Public transport features in a number of works, but trains are represented particularly strongly. In both Eric Eve’s, Nightfall and Jonathan Laury’s Ostrich trains are indicative of wider problems in society. Nightfall is a thriller where an unknown threat lurks in the city and that threat is made all the more ominous by the fact that the protagonist’s only means of escape – the train, is cut off at the opening of the story. In Ostrich, much of the scene-setting takes place on the protagonist’s commutes to and from work. As a totalitarian regime gradually takes over, who is and isn’t on the train, and how they behave during the journey becomes increasingly crucial. (Ostrich was created following the British Library’s Interactive Fiction Summer School in 2018).

In Journey Through Your Final Dream by Sammi Narramore and Awake the Mighty Dread by Lyle Skains, trains are presented as a dreamlike (or nightmarish) liminal space. Both works play around with the idea of falling asleep on a train and awaking disoriented and unsure whether the dream is truly over.

Many of the works live up to a particularly British stereotype by foregrounding tea. Joey Jones’ Strained Tea asks the user to perform the simple task of making a cup of tea. However, as this is a parser-based piece, the only commands available are to ‘take’, ‘put’ and move using the compass directions, turning this everyday act into a fiendishly difficult puzzle. Tom Sykes’ Fog Lights and Foul Deeds is a Lovecraftian tale set on a narrowboat, where the player-character and his crew must face the horrors lurking in the canal as they struggle to reach their destination. Tea serves as a resource which bolsters the crew’s resolve, increasing their morale and improving their chances of survival. Providing enough tea to keep the team sane, while also ensuring supplies don’t run out before journey’s end is a careful balancing act throughout the piece. Damon Wakes’ Lovely Pleasant Teatime Simulator begins as a very civilised affair where the reader-player may take tea with scones and compliment their host’s décor, but as the tea keeps coming and the banal chitchat loops around and around, new choices begin to emerge which will end the tea party in a variety of scandalous ways.

A huge number of the works deal with personal issues and experiences, with gender and sexuality occurring often, but mental health being the most prevalent topic. Many creators use the interactive affordances available to them to help convey how it feels to suffer from mental health issues. Joseph J Clark’s Depression Simulator is a short, looping piece in which no matter what option is chosen, text appears which reads: ‘You can’t. You are too sad’. Miles Aijala’s Fatigue takes a similar approach in that when the option ‘go out’ is selected, the text changes to ‘haha yeah right’ becoming greyed out and unselectable. Emma Winston’s What it Feels Like in Here is a poetic, meditative piece in which the reader-player guides a somewhat abstract avatar through a series of rooms which become smaller and smaller and darker and darker, echoing the feelings of anxiety, depression and claustrophobia discussed.

Since these works live on the internet, it’s perhaps no surprise that many are replete with cats. Creator Ben Bruce’s work is very cat-oriented, with highlights including Bedtime, Kitties, Said the Witch, where a gathering of talking felines pester their witch owner for a bedtime story, and Something That a Cat Once Told Me About Midnight, a legend translated from the original cat about why time behaves strangely around midnight. Freya Campbell’s Pépito incorporates the Twitterbot @PepitoTheCat into a Bitsy story to imagine a day in the life of an internet cat and reflect on the death of her own pets.

Finally, many of the works are self-reflexive and describe either the experience of writing interactive fiction, reading it, or being involved with its community. The Cat Demands by Adam Hay not only features an attention-seeking cat, it’s also about a Twine author’s struggles to complete their latest piece. A Short Journey by Cameron Home critiques the structure of many interactive narratives and questions whether what they’re offering can really be considered ‘choice’.

While the works themselves may offer only an illusion of choice, the collection as a whole offers a genuine range of works to choose from. I hope you’ll explore them via the UK Web Archive, and Webrecorder, or in their original locations using the links in this blog post. (Please note that as this is an experimental project, some works may not be fully accessible via the Web Archive. For the best viewing experience, visit the live versions of the sites).

By Lynda Clark, Innovation Placement, The British Library - @notagoth