The UK Web Archive started archiving web content towards the end of 2004 (e.g. The Hutton Enquiry). If we want to look back at the (almost) ten years that have passed since then, can we find a way to see how much we’ve achieved? Are the URLs we’ve archived still available on the live web? Or are they long since gone? If those URLs are still working, is the content the same as it was? How has our archival sliver of the web changed?

Looking Back
One option would be to go through our archives and exhaustively examine every single URL, and work out what has happened to it. However, the Open UK Web Archive contains many millions of archived resource, and even just checking their basic status would be very time-consuming, never mind performing any kind of comparison of the content of those pages.

Fortunately, to get a good idea of what has happened, we don’t need to visit every single item. Our full-text index categorizes our holdings by, among other things, the year in which the item was crawled. We can therefore use this facet of the search index to randomly sample a number of URLs from each year the archive has been in operation, and use those to build up a picture that compares those holdings to the current web.

URLs by the Thousand
Our search system has built-in support for randomizing the order of the results, so a simple script that performs a faceted search was all that was needed to build up a list of one thousand URLs for each year. A second script was used to attempt to re-download each of those URLs, and record the outcome of that process. Those results were then aggregated into an overall table showing how many URLs fell into each different class of outcome, versus crawl date, as shown below:

Here, ‘GONE’ means that not only is the URL missing, but the host that originally served that URL has disappeared from the web. ‘ERROR’, on the other hand, means that a server still responded to our request, but that our once-valid URL now causes the server to fail.

The next class, ‘MISSING’, ably illustrates the fate of the majority of our archived content - the server is there, and responds, but no longer recognizes that URL. Those early URLs have become 404 Not Found (either directly, or via redirects). The remaining two classes show URLs that end with a valid HTTP 200 OK response, either via redirects (‘MOVED’) or directly (‘OK’).

The horizontal axis shows the results over time, since late 2004, broken down by each quarter (i.e. 2004-4 is the fourth quarter of 2004). The overall trend clearly shows how the items we have archived have disappeared from the web, with individual URLs being forgotten as time passes. This is in contrast to the fairly stable baseline of ‘GONE’ web hosts, which reflects our policy of removing dead sites from the crawl schedules promptly.

Is OK okay?
However, so far, this only tells us what URLs are still active - the content of those resources could have changed completely. To explore this issue, we have to dig a little deeper by downloading the content and trying to compare what’s inside.

This is very hard to do in a way that is both automated and highly accurate, simply because there are currently no reliable methods for automatically determining when two resources carry the same meaning, despite being written in different words. So, we have to settle for something that is less accurate, but that can be done automatically.

The easy case is when the content is exactly the same – we can just record that the resources are identical at the binary level. If not, we extract whatever text we can from the archived and live URLs, and compare them to see how much the text has changed. To do this, we compute a fingerprint from the text contained in each resource, and then compare those to determine how similar the resources are. This technique has been used for many years in computer forensics applications, such as helping to identify ‘bad’ software, and here we adapt the approach in order to find similar web pages.

Specifically, we generate ssdeep ‘fuzzy hash’ fingerprints, and compare them in order to determine the degree of overlap in the textual content of the items. If the algorithm is able to find any similarity at all, we record the result as ‘SIMILAR’. Otherwise, we record that the items are ‘DISSIMILAR’.

Processing all of the ‘MOVED’ or ‘OK’ results in this way leads to this graph:

So, for all those ‘OK’ or ‘MOVED’ URLs, the vast majority appear to have changed. Very few are binary identical (‘SAME’), and while many of the others remain ‘SIMILAR’ at first, that fraction tails off as we go back in time.

Summarising Similarity
Combining the similarity data with the original graph, we can replace the ‘OK’ and ‘MOVED’ parts of the graph with the similarity results in order to see those trends in context:

Shown in this way, it is clear that very few archived resources are still available, unchanged, on the current web. Or, in other words, very few of our archived URLs are cool.

Local Vs Global Trends
While this analysis helps us understand the trends and value of our open archive, it’s not yet clear how much it tells us about other collections, or global trends. Historically, the UK Web Archive has focused on high-status sites and sites known to be at risk, and these selection criteria are likely to affect the overall trends. In particular, the very rapid loss of content observed here is likely due to the fact that so many of the sites we archive were known to be ‘at risk’ (such as the sites lost during the 2012 NHS reforms). We can partially address this by running the same kind of analysis over our broader, domain-scale collections. However, that would still bias things towards the UK, and it would be interesting to understand how these trends might differ across countries, and globally.

By Andy Jackson, Web Archiving Technical Lead, The British Library

Hedley Sutton, Asian & African Studies Reference Team Leader at The British Library gives his thoughts and experiences of web archiving.

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.

The rise of digital
Digital content is of course increasingly important for researchers, and is certain to become ever more so as publishers slowly move away from print to online formats. The Library recognized this when it began to archive websites in 2004, aiming to harvest a segment of the vast national web domain by providing free access both to live sites and to snapshots of existing and defunct sites as they developed over time.

Those which have been fully ‘accessioned’, as it were, are available to view online, and can be found alphabetically by title, or subject/keyword, or in some cases grouped in themed collections such as the 2012 London Olympics or the ‘Credit crunch’. 

Websites of interest
I volunteered to become a selector in 2008, planning initially to concentrate on tracing websites within my own specialism of Asian and African studies. I soon discovered, however, that it was more rewarding (addictive, even) to look beyond conventional subject divisions to home in on all and anything that looked of potential interest to present and future users of the archive.

Worthy, unusual and not-quite-believe-it
Over the years this has ranged from the worthy (such as the UK Web Designers’ Association and the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research), through the unusual (step forward the Federation of Holistic Therapists, the Fellowship of Christian Magicians, and the Society for the Assistance of Ladies in Reduced Circumstances), to the I-see-it-but-do-not-quite-believe-it (yes, I mean you, British Leafy Salads Association; no, don’t try and run away, Ferret Education and Research Trust; all power to you, Campaign Against Living Miserably). Being paid to spend part of your time surfing the web – what’s not to like?

Permission required
The only mildly disappointing aspect of selecting websites is the fact that at present only about 20% of recommended sites actually make it into the Open UK Web Archive. The explanation is simple – the Library requires formal permission from website owners before it can ingest and display their sites.

This is offset in part by the amendment to the Legal Deposit legislation that (since 2013) has allowed The British Library to archive all UK websites. These, however, can only be viewed in the Reading Rooms of the UK Legal Deposit Libraries.

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

By Hedley Sutton - Asian & African Studies Reference Team Leader, The British Library

As all thoughts turn to Scotland and the Scottish Referendum which is taking place on the 18th of September it seems appropriate to highlight some recent developments in the digital sphere that will impact the Web Archiving Team over the coming months.

New top level domain (TLD) for Scotland
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has released a suite of new top level domains (TLDs) this year. One of these is .scot (live since 15 July 2014) allowing organisations and individuals to create websites and email addresses identifying themselves as Scottish. The new TLD follows a near-decade long campaign by the Dot Scot Registry, a not-for-profit company created to apply for and operate the .scot domain as an online identity for Scots worldwide.

Pioneers
.scot is a community domain meaning anyone can apply for it, however for the first 60 days the domain was only available to launch ‘pioneers’, a cross section of organisations based in Scotland or part of the Scottish diaspora community. The first pioneer website to go live on 15th July was calico.scot - a Highlands based Internet Service Provider who offer .scot domain registrations. Over 50 pioneers have signed up including the Scottish government, the Scouts in Scotland, Yes Scotland and Better Together.

Scotland beyond Britain
Individuals and groups outside of Scotland have also taken advantage of the new domain with the Louisiana Scots and the Clan Wallace among the first international organisations to launch websites using the new domain ahead of the general launch on 23rd September.

New-borns get a domain name
The Dot Scot Registry has come up with a unique idea to publicise the .scot TLD by reserving a few domain names for any Scottish baby born on 15 July for free. In a press release on their website, the organisation said: ‘It’s taken nine years to get to this point – and we want to celebrate this “birth” in as many ways as possible. So, if you know someone who had a baby in Scotland on 15 July 2014, contact our press team, and we’ll secure their .scot for them … It’s our little way of saying “welcome to the world and the digital future for Scotland.”’.

In the archive
The UK Web Archiving Team are already collecting .scot websites as part of our annual domain crawl along with .london websites, another of the TLDs released by ICANN this year. A phased release of the .cymru and .wales TLDs was launched this month by the UK internet registry, Nominet, with general availability due in March 2015. These websites will also be picked up by the British Library’s annual domain crawl.

Short lived?
One final point to make is that .scot might be superseded if the Scottish referendum on independence succeeds and Scotland were to leave the United Kingdom as it would get its own two letter country code TLD. Let’s see…..

Nicola Bingham, Web Archivist, The British Library

When we archive the web, we want to do our best to ensure that future generations will be able to access the content we have preserved. This isn’t only a matter of keeping the digital files safe and ensuring they don’t get damaged. We also need to worry about the software that is required in order to access those resources.

A Digital Dark Age?
For many years, the spectre of obsolescence and the ensuing digital dark age drove much of the research into digital preservation. However, even back in 2006, Chris Rusbridge was arguing that this concern was overblown, and since at least 2007, David Rosenthal has been arguing that this kind of obsolescence is no longer credible.

What are the risks?
The current consensus among those who care for content seems to have largely (but not universally) shifted away from perceiving obsolescence as the main risk we face. Many of us expect the vast majority of our content to remain accessible for at least one or two decades, and any attempt to predict the future beyond the next twenty years should be taken with a large pinch of salt. In the meantime, we are likely to face much more basic issues concerning the economics of storage, and concerning the need to adopt scalable collection management techniques to ensure the content we have remains safe, discoverable, and is accompanied by the contextual information it depends upon.

This is not to say obsolescence is no risk at all, but rather that the scale of the problem is uncertain. Therefore, in order to know how best to take care of our digital history, we need to find ways of gathering more evidence about this issue.

Understanding our collections
One aspect of this is to analyse the content we have, and try to understand how it has changed over time. Examples of this kind of work include our paper on Formats Over Time (more here), and more recent work on embedding this kind of preservation analysis in our full-text indexing processes so we can explore these issues more readily.

But studying the content can only tell you half the story - for the other half, we need to work out what we mean by obsolescence.

Understanding obsolescence
If there is an open source implementation of a given format, then we might say that format cannot be obsolete. But if 99.9% of the visitors to the web archive are not aware of that fact (and even if they were, would not be able to compile and build the software in order to access the content), is that really an accurate statement? If the members of our designated community can’t open it, then it’s obsolete, whether or not someone somewhere has all the time, skills and resources needed to make it work.

Obsolescence is a user experience problem that ends with frustration. So how can we better understand the needs and capabilities of our users, to enable them to help drive the digital preservation process?

How Interject can help
To this end, and working with the SCAPE Project, we have built a prototype service that is designed to help us find the content that users are having difficulties with, and where possible, to provide alternative ways of accessing that content. This prototype service, called Interject, demonstrates how a mixture of feedback systems and preservation actions can be smoothly integrated into the search infrastructure of the UK Web Archive, by acting as an ‘access helper’ for end users.

ZX Spectrum Software
For example, if you go to our historical search prototype and look for a specific file called ‘lostcave.z80’ you’ll see the Internet Archive has a number of copies of this old ZX Spectrum game but, unless you have an emulator to hand, you won’t be able to use them. However, if you click ‘Use our access helper’, the Interject service will inspect the resource, summarise what we understand about it, and where possible offer transformed versions of that resource. In the case of ‘lostcave.z80’, this includes a full browser-based emulation so that you can actually play the game yourself. (Note that this example was partially inspired by the excellent work on browser-based emulated access being carried out by the Internet Archive).

The Interject service can offer a range of transformation options for a given format. For example, instead of running the emulator in your browser, the service can spin up an emulator in the background, take a screenshot, and then deliver that image back to you, like this:

These simple screenshots are not quite as impressive as the multi-frame GIFs created by Jason Scott’s Screen Shotgun, but they do illustrate the potential a simple web API that transforms content on demand.

Early image formats
As the available development time was relatively short, we were only able to add support for a few ‘difficult’ formats. For example, the X BitMap image format was the first image format on the web. However, despite this early and important role this format and the related X PixMap format (for colour images) are not widely supported today and so may require format conversion in order to enable access. Fortunately, there are a number of open source projects that support these formats, and Interject makes them easy to use. See for example image.xbm, xterm-linux.xpm and this embedded equation image shown below as a more modern PNG:

VRML
We also added support for VRML1 and VRML97, two early web-based formats for 3D environments that required a browser plugin to explore. Those plugins are not available for modern browsers, and the formats have been superseded by the X3D format. Unfortunately these formats are not backward compatible with each other, and tool support for VRML1 is quite limited. However, we were able to find suitable tools for all three formats, and using Interject, we are able to take a VRML1 file, and then combine a two format conversions (VRML1-to-VRML97 and VRML97-to-X3D) before passing the result to a browser-based X3D renderer, like this.

The future of Interject
Each format we decide to support adds an additional development and maintenance burden, and so it is not clear how sustainable this approach will be in the long term. This is one of the reasons why Interject is open source, and we would be very happy to receive ideas or contributions from other individuals and organisations.

Letting users lead the way
But even with a limited number of transformation services, the core of this idea is to find ways to listen to our users, so we have some chance of finding out what content is ‘obsolete’ to them. By listening when they ask for help, and by allowing our visitors to decide between the available options, the real needs of our designated communities can be expressed directly to us and so taken into account as part of the preservation planning process.

By Andy Jackson, Web Archiving Technical Lead, The British Library

Since the passing of Legal Deposit legislation in April of 2013 the UK Web Archive has been generating screenshots of the front-pages of each visited website. The manner in which we chose to store these has changed over the course of our activities, from simple JPEG files on disk (a silly idea) to HAR-based records with WARC metadata records (hopefully a less silly idea). What follows is our reasoning behind these choices.

What not to do
When Legal Deposit legislation passed in April of 2013 we were experimenting with the asynchronous rendering of web pages in a headless browser (specifically PhantomJS) to avoid some of the limitations we’d encountered with our crawler software. While doing so it occurred to us that if we were taking the time to actually render a page in a browser, why not generate and store screenshots?

As we had no particular use-case in mind they were simply stored in a flat file system, the filename being the Epoch time at which they were rendered, e.g:

13699895733441.jpg

There’s an obvious flaw here: the complete lack of any detail as to the provenance of the image. Unfortunately that wasn’t quite obvious enough and after approximately 15 weeks and 1,118,904 screenshots we changed the naming scheme to something more useful, e.g:

http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bl.uk%2F_1365759028.jpg

The above now includes the encoded URL and the epoch timestamp. This was again changed one final time, replacing the epoch timestamp with a human-readable version, e.g:

http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bl.uk%2F_20130604121723.jpg

Despite a more sensible naming convention we were still left with a large number of files sitting in a directory on disk which could not be stored along with our crawled content and as a consequence of this, could not be accessed by normal channels.

A bit better?
A simple solution was to store the images in WARC files (ISO 28500—the current de facto storage format for web archives). We could then permanently archive them alongside our regular web content and access them in a similar fashion. However, the WARC format is designed specifically for storing web content, i.e. a resource referenced by a URL. Our screenshots, unfortunately, didn’t really fit this pattern. Each represented the Webkit rendering of a web page, actually likely to be the result of any number of web resources, not just the single HTML page referenced by the site’s root URL. We therefore did what anyone does when faced with a conundrum of sufficient brevity: we took to Twitter.

The WARC format contains several types of record which we potentially could have used: response, resource, conversion and metadata. The resource and response record types are intended to store the “output of a URI-addressable service” (thanks, @gojomo). Although our screenshots are actually rendered using a webservice, the URI used to generate them would not necessarily correspond to that of the original site, thus losing the relationship between the site and the image. We could have used a further metadata record to tie the two together but others (thanks to @tef and @junklight) had already suggested that a metadata record might be the best location for the screenshots themselves. Bowing to conventional wisdom, we opted for this latter method.

WARC-type: metadata
As mentioned earlier, screenshots are actually rendered using a PhantomJS-based webservice —the same webservice used to extract links from the rendered page. It is at this point worth noting that when rendering a page and outputting details of all requests/responses made/received during said rendering, PhantomJS by default returns this information in HTTP Archive (HAR) format. Although not specifically a formal standard, HAR has become the almost de facto method for communicating HTTP transaction information (most browsers will export data about a page in this format).

The HAR format permits information to be communicated not only about the page, but about each of the component resources used to create that page (i.e. the stylesheets, Javascript, images, etc.). As part of each response entry—each pertaining to one of the aforementioned resources—the HAR format allows you to store the actual content of that response in a “text” field, e.g:

Unfortunately, this is where the HAR format doesn't quite meet our needs. Rather than storing the content for a particular resource we need to store content for the rendered page—potentially the result of several resources and thus not suited to a response record.

Thankfully though, the HAR format does permit you to record information at a page level:

Better still…
Given the above we decided to leverage the HAR format by combining elements from the content section of the response with those of the page. There were two things we realised we could store:

1. As initially desired, an image of the rendered page.
2. The final DOM of the rendered page.

With this latter addition, it occured to us that the final representation of a HTML page—thanks to client-side Javascript altering the DOM—might differ from that which the server originally returned. As this final representation was the version which PhantomJS used to render the screenshot it made sense to attempt to record that too. In order to distinguish this final, rendered version from content of the HAR’s corresponding response record the name was amended to renderedContent.

Similarly named, we stored the screenshot of the whole, rendered page under a new element, renderedElements:

‘renderedElements’?
Given that we were trying to store a single screenshot, storing it in an element which is firstly, plural and secondly, an array, might seem a questionable choice. PhantomJS has one further ability that we decided to leverage for future use: the ability to render images of specific elements within a page.

In the course of a crawl there are some things we can't (yet) archive—videos, embedded maps, etc. However, if we can identify the presence of some non-archivable section of a page (an iframe which references a Google Map, for instance), we can at least render an image of it for later reference.
For this reason, the whole-page screenshot is simply referenced by its CSS selector (“:root”), enabling us to include a further series of images for any part of the page.

About those jpgs…
Currently, all screenshots are stored in the above format, in WARCs and will be ingested alongside regularly-crawled data. The older set of JPEGs on disk were converted, using the URL and timestamp in the filename, to the above HAR-like format (obviously lacking details of other resources and the final DOM which had been lost) and added to a series of WARC files.

The very earliest set of images, those simply stored using the Epoch time, are regrettably left as an exercise for future workers in Digital Preservation.

by Roger G. Coram, Web Crawl Engineer, The British Library

Among the responses to our earlier post, 'How much of the UK’s HTML is valid?', Gary McGath’s 'HTML and fuzzy validity' deserves to be highlighted, as it explores an issue very close to our hearts: how to cope when the modern web is dominated by JavaScript.

The Age of JavaScript
In particular, he discusses one of the central challenges of the Age of JavaScript: making sure you have copies of all the resources that are dynamically loaded as the page is rendered. We tend to call this ‘dependency analysis’, and we consider this to be a much more pressing preservation risk than bit rot or obsolescence. If you never even know you need something, you’ll never go get it and so never even get the chance to preserve it.

The <script> tag
To give you an idea of the problem, the following graph shows how the usage of the <script> tag has varied over time:

In 1995, almost no pages used the <script> tag, but fifteen years later, over 95% of web pages require JavaScript. This has been a massive sea-change in the nature of the World Wide Web, and web archives have had to react to it or face irrelevance.

Tools
For example, for the Internet Archive’s Archive-It Service, they have developed the Umbra tool, which uses a browser testing engine based on Google Chrome to process URLs sent from the Heritrix crawler, extract the additional URLs that content depends upon, and send them back to Heritrix to be crawled.

We use a similar system during our crawls, including domain crawls. However, rendering web pages takes time and resources, so we don’t render every single URL of the billions in each domain crawl. Instead, we render all host home-pages, and we render the ‘catalogued’ URLs that our curators have indicated are of particular interest. The architecture is similar to that used by Umbra, based around our own page rendering service.

We’ve been doing this since the first domain crawl in 2013, and so this seems to be one area where the web archives are ahead of Google and their attempts to understand web pages better.

Screenshots
Furthermore, given we are having to render the pages anyway, we have used this as an opportunity to take screenshots of the original web pages during the crawl, and to add those screenshots to the archival store (we’ll cover more of the details on that in a later blog post). This means we are in a much better position to evaluate any future preservation actions we might require reconstructing the rendering process and we expect these historical screenshots to be of great interest to the researchers of the future.

By Andy Jackson, Web Archiving Technical Lead, The British Library

The British Library is only one of dozens of national libraries, universities and other organisations around the world that harvest, preserve and give access to web archive resources. We are also a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) that has 48 members worldwide, committed to the long-term preservation of internet resources.

A world of web archiving
Following much recent discussion, member institutions of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) recently added their collection development policies for web archiving to their website. This page also contains links to policies of some web archiving institutions which are not IIPC members. We are not looking at an exhaustive list for either category, however, it is still interesting to see policies brought together and read them in conjunction.

Different remits
These policies reflect the different scope of web archiving activities among the listed institutions. Some have a national remit (like The British Library), others selectively archive the web or undertake web archiving as a programme or for a project. Some (more fortunate) national institutions are supported by legislative frameworks such as Legal Deposit and can therefore archive the web at scale - the national libraries of France, UK, Finland and Austria belong to this category. Although not explicitly expressed, the lack of such framework has among others contributed to the choice of selective web archiving in some countries.

The policies vary in format, length and detail, but contain some common themes. They explain why institutions undertake web archiving, the scope of the material for collection, how websites are collected, stored and used. Some policies also cover the roles and responsibilities if web archiving is done using a collaborative model. The Bentley Historical Library’s policy is a good example, which includes a section on the responsibilities of the archive, the provider of the service the Library subscribes to, and that of the content owners.

Legal issues
Various legal aspects are covered by these polices, ranging from intellectual properties, permissions to sensitive data within the web archives. The Finnish policy, by far the most comprehensive among all policies, lists and describes legislations relevant to web archiving including the library’s interpretation. It also deals with the topic of sensitive data comprehensively, dividing it into the following categories:

• Personal Data Illegitimately Published
• Inspection and Correction of Personal Data
• Confidential and Secret Information
• Web Contents that Violate Law
• Web Contents Illegal to Hold

Common strategies
The National Library of Austria provide a short overview of the common strategies for web harvesting, which are adopted by institutions individually or in some form of combination. Access and use of the archive is another common theme - a number of policies state restricted access to web archives, especially those collected under national legal framework as an exemption to copyright.

Web archiving institutions share the same mission, face similar legal and technical challenges. The IIPC is a great platform to collaborate and learn transferrable lessons and practices. It may be a good idea to develop a common template for policy statements and make sure the most up to date versions are published.

By Helen Hockx-Yu, Head of Web Archiving, The British Library

As curator for sport in the British Library I have had a pretty exciting time in recent years, with plenty of sporting mega-events hitting the headlines in the UK, including the London Olympic Games and recently the Tour de France starting In Yorkshire.

The latter was celebrated by the Library in a number of ways: several members of staff actually biked from St Pancras to our Yorkshire site in Boston Spa (a two-day; 200 mile journey); while I (taking the train!) helped to create a small exhibition of cycling-related collections items in cases close to the newly refurbished Boston Spa reading room. Here I am with my colleague Robert Davies in front of the exhibition.

As with most of the significant events taking place in this country, the web archiving team wanted to make a record of the Tour of Yorkshire’s online presence for future researchers, so I was given a watching brief for relevant websites.

 

The Grand Depart
Everyone now knows that the Grand Depart was a resounding success in attracting enthusiastic spectators all along its route from Leeds to the Mall in London. The Tour organisers expected three million people to line the roads; they achieved more than double that! I anticipated a great response (similar to the success of the torch relay in 2012) so I was very keen to ensure that we archive the many different websites of the local councils and tourist offices through whose boroughs and counties the tour would pass. Many of these web sites had huge amounts of information on them, from details of local campsites, guest houses and B&Bs to special brochures with interactive maps and lists of events connected to the Tour. Opportunities for future tourism were clearly being optimised.

A mega event
It had to be borne in mind that the Grand Depart was not just a special event for the UK but formed part of a larger sociological and anthropological phenomenon: i.e., the mega-event, a phenomenon which is a growing area of research in a number of subject areas – not only in sport, where the development of organisations like the IOC and FIFA are of interest to sports sociologists and historians – but to economists and cultural observers. The local activity encouraged by such events, like the Tour-associated cultural festivals, and educational projects bear witness to their wide-ranging social impact.

Which websites to archive?
So all this had to be recorded if possible. Add to this the day-by-day; hour-by-hour reports of media organisations like broadcasters and newspapers and there were clearly a large number of websites waiting to be gathered. One aspect did seem to be missing, and that was the protest sites, which tend to be much in evidence with events like the Olympic Games. Contrary to this, most Tour websites were celebrating the Tour in every way possible. Where they did echo the Olympics was in their keen embracing of the successful outcomes of the latter - such as volunteering - with Asda sponsoring a volunteering website which called for route and crossing marshals, ‘dignitary managers’ and coordinators of all kinds.

The riders
The websites of the riders themselves proved problematic at first, as it was not clear until almost the last minute who was going to ride. In the end, as we know, Sir Bradley Wiggins bowed out, but we made sure that we kept a close eye on Chris Froome and Mark Cavendish, as well as the UK based teams like Team Sky, The British Cycling Organisation and the Tour de France organisation itself. It was a huge disappointment to see British hopes being dashed by falls but we can now follow Chris Froomes twitter feed, from his original expressions of excitement to his reports on his MRI scans ‘confirmed fractures to the left wrist and right hand’. While on his Facebook page, Mark Cavendish displays a picture of himself fresh from the operating theatre! Sad, but interesting, times.

The collection
Websites are marvellous research sources for the study of sport in particular. With their aid you can observe events as they take place from day to day, and get a marvellous feel for the atmosphere surrounding these exciting occasions. The process of archiving the Tour sites is not over. In the aftermath of such events the sites will often sum up their experiences, and others may even spring up in response to what has taken place. So the watching brief is certainly not over!

By Gill Ridgley, Lead Curator, Sociological and Cultural Studies, The British Library