Category Archives: Web Archives

Can web archives tell stories?

21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Medical, Modern, Newly available (2022), Web Archives, ,

Archives tell stories. A series of induction sessions with archivists have brought me, a web archivist, to a new understanding of what archives are and what archivists do.

Archivists enable stories to be told — stories about people, organisations, society and much more. Archival materials bring them back to life. The very making of a collection — how its contents have been selected, preserved and made available to the public, and how some have not – constitute stories in themselves.

But can web archives tell stories? Web archives differ from conventional archives, where archival material comes into custody as a collection with a relatively clear boundary, within which archivists carry out appraisal, selection and cataloguing work. The boundaries for web archives, by comparison, have been both blurred and expanded.

Continue reading →

Invasion of Ukraine: web archiving volunteers needed

21st century, Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Digital archives, Social Sciences, Uncategorized, Web Archives,

The Bodleian Libraries Web Archive (BLWA) needs your help to document what is happening in Ukraine and the surrounding region. Much of the information about Ukraine being added to the web right now will be ephemeral, and especially information from individuals about their experiences, and those of the people around them. Action is needed to ensure we preserve some of these contemporary insights for future reflection. We hope to archive a range of different content, including social media, and to start forming a resource which can join with other collections being developed elsewhere to:

  • capture the experiences of people affected by the invasion, both within and outside of Ukraine
  • reflect the different ways the crisis is being described and discussed, including misinformation and propaganda
  • record the response to the crisis

To play our part, we need help from individuals with relevant cultural knowledge and language skills who can select websites for archiving. We are particularly interested in Ukrainian and Russian websites, and those from other countries in the region, though any suggestions are welcome.

Please nominate websites via: https://www2.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/beam/webarchive/nominate

Call for contributions: Afghanistan regime change (2021) and the international response web archive collection

21st century, Digital archives, Modern, Web Archives

On 4 October 2021, the International Internet Preservation Coalition (IIPC) initiated a web archiving collection in response to recent events in Afghanistan. Colleagues at the University of Oxford, and beyond, are invited to contribute nominations for websites to be archived in the collection.

The collection theme is Afghanistan regime change (2021) and the international response. The focus is on the international aspects of events in Afghanistan documenting transnational involvement and worldwide interest in the process of regime change, documenting how the situation evolves over time.

A post on the IIPC’s blog, by the collection’s lead curator Nicola Bingham (British Library), provides further details of the background and scope of the collection.

How to contribute to the collection:

  1. Please read the Collection Scoping Document and accompanying IIPC blog post for more details on the collection and a full overview of the collecting scope.
  2. Enter nominations for websites, and a small amount of basic metadata, via the collection’s Google Form. The Google form accepts website nominations in non-English scripts.

This post is based on Nicola Bingham’s blog IIPC Collaborative collection: “Afghanistan regime change (2021) and the international response”.

Conference Report: IIPC Web Archiving Conference 2021

21st century, Digital archives, Event, Modern, Social Sciences, Web Archives, , ,

This year’s International Internet Preservation Consortium Web Archiving Conference was held online from 15-16th June 2021, bringing together professionals from around the world to share their experiences of preserving the Web as a research tool for future generations. In this blog post, Simon Mackley reports back on some of the highlights from the conference.  

How can we best preserve the World Wide Web for future researchers, and how can we best provide access to our collections? These were the questions that were at the forefront of this year’s International Internet Preservation Consortium Web Archiving Conference, which was hosted virtually by the National Library of Luxembourg. Web archiving is a subject of particular interest to me: as one of the Bodleian Library’s Graduate Trainee Digital Archivists, I spend a lot of my time working on our own Web collections as part of the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive. It was great therefore to have the chance to attend part of this virtual conference and hear for myself about new developments in the sector.

One thing that really struck me from the conference was the huge diversity in approaches to preserving the Web. On the one hand, many of the papers concerned large-scale efforts by national legal deposit institutions. For instance, Ivo Branco, Ricardo Basílio, and Daniel Gomes gave a very interesting presentation on the creation of the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections collection at the Portuguese Web Archive. This was a highly ambitious project, with the aim of crawling not just the Portuguese Web domain but also capturing a snapshot of elections coverage across 24 different European languages through the use of an automated search engine and a range of web crawler technologies (see their blog for more details). The World Wide Web is perhaps the ultimate example of an international information resource, so it is brilliant to see web archiving initiatives take a similarly international approach.

At the other end of the scale, Hélène Brousseau gave a fascinating paper on community-based web archiving at Artexte library and research centre, Canada. Within the arts community, websites often function as digital publications analogous to traditional exhibition catalogues. Brousseau emphasised the need for manual web archiving rather than automated crawling as a means of capturing the full content and functionality of these digital publications, and at Artexete this has been achieved by training website creators to self-archive their own websites using Conifer. Given that in many cases web archivists often have minimal or even no contact with website creators, it was fascinating to hear of an approach that places creators at the very heart of the process.

It was also really interesting to hear about the innovative new ways that web archives were engaging with researchers using their collections, particularly in the use of new ‘Labs’-style approaches. Marie Carlin and Dorothée Benhamou-Suesser for instance reported on the new services being planned for researchers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France Data Lab, including a crawl-on-demand service and the provision of web archive datasets. New methodologies are always being developed within the Digital Humanities, and so it is vitally important that web archives are able to meet the evolving needs of researchers.

Like all good conferences, the papers and discussions did not solely focus on the successes of the past year, but also explored the continued challenges of web archiving and how they can be addressed. Web archiving is often a resource-intensive activity, which can prove a significant challenge for collecting institutions. This was a major point of discussion in the panel session on web archiving the coronavirus pandemic, as institutions had to balance the urgency of quickly capturing web content during a fast-evolving crisis against the need to manage resources for the longer-term, as it became apparent that the pandemic would last months rather than weeks. It was clear from the speakers that no two institutions had approached documenting the pandemic in quite the same way, but nonetheless some very useful general lessons were drawn from the experiences, particularly about the need to clearly define collection scope and goals at the start of any collecting project dealing with rapidly changing events.

The question of access presents an even greater challenge. We ultimately work to preserve the Web so that researchers can make use of it, but as a sector we face significant barriers in delivering this goal. The larger legal deposit collections, for instance, can often only be consulted in the physical reading rooms of their collecting libraries. In his opening address to the conference, Claude D. Conter of the National Library of Luxembourg addressed this problem head-on, calling for copyright reform in order to meet reader expectations of access.

Yet although these challenges may be significant, I have no doubt from the range of new and innovative approaches showcased at this conference that the web archiving sector will be able to overcome them. I am delighted to have had the chance to attend the conference, and I cannot wait to see how some of the projects presented continue to develop in the years to come.

Simon Mackley

UK Web Archive mini-conference 2020

21st century, Digital archives, Uncategorized, Web Archives, , , ,

On Wednesday 19th November I attended the UK Web Archive (UKWA) mini-conference 2020, my first conference as a Graduate Trainee Digital Archivist. It was hosted by Jason Webber, Engagement Manager at the UKWA and, as normal in these COVID times, it was hosted on Zoom (my first ever Zoom experience!)

The conference started with an introduction and demonstration of the UKWA by Jason Webber. Starting in 2005 the UKWA’s mission is to collect the entire UK webspace, at least once per year, and preserve the websites for future generations. As part of my traineeship I have used the UKWA but it was interesting to hear about the other functions and collections it provides. Along with being able to browse different versions of UK websites it also includes over 100 curated collections on themes ranging from Food to Brexit to Online Enthusiast Communities in the UK. It also features the SHINE tool, which was developed as part of the ‘Big UK Data Arts and Humanities’ project and contains over 3.5 billion items which have been full-text indexed so that every word is searchable. It allows users to perform searches and trend analysis on subjects over a huge range of websites, all you need to use this tool is a bit a Python knowledge. My Python knowledge is a bit basic but Caio Mello, during his researcher talk, provided a useful link for online python tutorials aimed at historians to aid in their research.

In his talk, Caio Mello (School of Advanced Study, University of London) discussed how he used the SHINE tool as part of his work for the CLEOPATRA Project. He was specifically looking at the Olympic legacy of the 2012 Olympics, how it was defined and how the view of the legacy changed over time. He explained the process he used to extract the information and the ways the information can be used for analysis, visualisation and context. My background is in mathematics and the concept of ‘Big Data’ came up frequently during my studies so it was fascinating to see how it can be used in a research project and how the UKWA is enabling research to be conducted over such a wide range of subjects.

The next researcher talk by Liam Markey (University of Liverpool and the British Library) showed a different approach to using the UKWA for his research project into how Remembrance in 20th Century Britain has changed. He explained how he conducted an analysis of archived newspaper articles, using specific search terms, to identify articles that focused on commemoration which he could then use to examine how the attitudes changed over time. The UKWA enabled him to find websites that focused on the war and compare these with mainstream newspapers to see how these differ.

The Keynote speaker was Paul Gooding (University of Glasgow) and was about the use and users of Non-Print Legal Deposit Libraries. His research as part of the Digital Library Futures Project, with the Bodleian Libraries and Cambridge University Library as case study partners, looked at how Academic Deposit libraries were impacted by e-Legal Deposit. It was an interesting discussion around some of the issues of the system, such as balancing the commercial rights with access for users and how highly restrictive access conditions are at odds with more recent legislation, such as the provision for disabled users and 2014 copyright exception for data and text mining for non-commercial uses.

Being new to the digital archiving world, my first conference was a great introduction to web archiving and provided context to the work I am doing. Thank you to the organisers and speakers for giving me insight into a few of the different ways the web archive is used and I have come away with a greater understanding of the scope and importance of digital archiving (as well as a list of blog posts and tutorials to delve into!)

Some Useful Links:

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/

https://programminghistorian.org/

https://blogs.bl.uk/webarchive/2020/11/how-remembrance-day-has-changed.html

http://cleopatra-project.eu/

 

#WeMissiPRES: Preserving social media and boiling 1.04 x 10^16 kettles

21st century, Digital archives, Sciences, Uncategorized, Web Archives, , , ,

This year the annual iPRES digital preservation conference was understandably postponed and in its place the community hosted a 3-day Zoom conference called #WeMissiPRES. As two of the Bodleian Libraries’ Graduate Trainee Digital Archivists, Simon and I were in attendance and blogged about our experiences. This post contains some of my highlights.

The conference kicked off with a keynote by Geert Lovink. Geert is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures and the author of several books on critical Internet studies. His talk was wide-ranging and covered topics from the rise of so-called ‘Zoom fatigue’ (I guarantee you know this feeling by now) to how social media platforms affect all aspects of contemporary life, often in negative ways. Geert highlighted the importance of preserving social media in order to allow future generations to be able to understand the present historical moment. However, this is a complicated area of digital preservation because archiving social media presents a host of ethical and technical challenges. For instance, how do we accurately capture the experience of using social media when the content displayed to you is largely dictated by an algorithm that is not made public for us to replicate?

After the keynote I attended a series of talks about the ARCHIVER project. João Fernandes from CERN explained that the goal of this project is to improve archiving and digital preservation services for scientific and research data. Preservation solutions for this type of data need to be cost-effective, scalable, and capable of ingesting amounts of data within the petabyte range. There were several further talks from companies who are submitting to the design phase of this project, including Matthew Addis from Arkivum. Matthew’s talk focused on the ways that digital preservation can be conducted on the industrial scale required to meet the brief and explained that Arkivum is collaborating with Google to achieve this, because Google’s cloud infrastructure can be leveraged for petabyte-scale storage. He also noted that while the marriage of preserved content with robust metadata is important in any digital preservation context, it is essential for repositories dealing with very complex scientific data.

In the afternoon I attended a range of talks that addressed new standards and technologies in digital preservation. Linas Cepinskas (Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS)) spoke about a self-assessment tool for the FAIR principles, which is designed to assess whether data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Later, Barbara Sierman (DigitalPreservation.nl) and Ingrid Dillo (DANS) spoke about TRUST, a new set of guiding principles that are designed to map well with FAIR and assess the reliability of data repositories. Antonio Guillermo Martinez (LIBNOVA) gave a talk about his research into Artificial Intelligence and machine learning applied to digital preservation. Through case studies, he identified that AI is especially good at tasks such as anomaly detection and automatic metadata generation. However, he found that regardless of how well the AI performs, it needs to generate better explanations for its decisions, because it’s hard for human beings to build trust in automated decisions that we find opaque.

Paul Stokes from Jisc3C gave a talk on calculating the carbon costs of digital curation and unfortunately concluded that not much research has been done in this area. The need to improve the environmental sustainability of all human activity could not be more pressing and digital preservation is no exception, as approximately 3% of the world’s electricity is used by data centres. Paul also offered the statistic that enough power is consumed by data centres worldwide to boil 10,400,000,000,000,000 kettles – which is the most important digital preservation metric I can think of.

This conference was challenging and eye-opening because it gave me an insight into (complicated!) areas of digital preservation that I was not familiar with, particularly surrounding the challenges of preserving large quantities of scientific and research data. I’m very grateful to the speakers for sharing their research and to the organisers, who did a fantastic job of bringing the community together to bridge the gap between 2019 and 2021!

#WeMissiPRES: A Bridge from 2019 to 2021

21st century, Digital archives, Event, Modern, Social Sciences, Web Archives, , , ,

Every year, the international digital preservation community meets for the iPRES conference, an opportunity for practitioners to exchange knowledge and showcase the latest developments in the field. With the 2020 conference unable to take place due to the global pandemic, digital preservation professionals instead gathered online for #WeMissiPRES to ensure that the global community remained connected. Our graduate trainee digital archivist Simon Mackley attended the first day of the event; in this blog post he reflects on some of the highlights of the talks and what they tell us about the state of the field.

How do you keep the global digital preservation community connected when international conferences are not possible? This was the challenge faced by the organisers of #WeMissIPres, a three-day online event hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition. Conceived as a festival of digital preservation, the aim was not to try and replicate the regular iPRES conference in an online format, but instead to serve as a bridge for the digital preservation community, connecting the efforts of 2019 with the plans for 2021.

As might be expected, the impact of the pandemic loomed large in many of the talks. Caylin Smith (Cambridge University Library) and Sara Day Thomson (University of Edinburgh) for instance gave a fascinating paper on the challenge of rapidly collecting institutional responses to coronavirus, focusing on the development of new workflows and streamlined processes. The difficulties of working from home, the requirements of remote access to resources, and the need to move training online likewise proved to be recurrent themes throughout the day. As someone whose own experience of digital preservation has been heavily shaped by the pandemic (I began my traineeship at the start of lockdown!) it was really useful to hear how colleagues in other institutions have risen to these challenges.

I was also struck by the different ways in which responses to the crisis have strengthened digital preservation efforts. Lynn Bruce and Eve Wright (National Records of Scotland) noted for instance that the experience of the pandemic has led to increased appreciation of the value of web-archiving from stakeholders, as the need to capture rapidly-changing content has become more apparent. Similarly, Natalie Harrower (Digital Repository of Ireland) made the excellent point that the crisis had not only highlighted the urgent need for the sharing of medical research data, but also the need to preserve it: Coronavirus data may one day prove essential to fighting a future pandemic, and so there is therefore a moral imperative for us to ensure that it is preserved.

As our keynote speaker Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures) reminded us, the events of the past year have been momentous quite apart from the pandemic, with issues such as the distorting impacts of social media on society, the climate emergency, and global demands for racial justice all having risen to the forefront of society. It was great therefore to see the role of digital preservation in these challenges being addressed in many of the panel sessions. A personal highlight for me was the presentation by Daniel Steinmeier (KB National Library of the Netherlands) on diversity and digital preservation. Steinmeier stressed that in order for diversity efforts to be successful, institutions needed to commit to continuing programmes of inclusion rather than one-off actions, with the communities concerned actively included in the archiving process.

So what challenges can we expect from the year ahead? Perhaps more than ever, this year this has been a difficult question to answer. Nonetheless, a key theme that struck me from many of the discussions was that the growing challenge of archiving social media platforms was matched only by the increasing need to preserve the content hosted on them. As Zefi Kavvadia (International Institute of Social History) noted, many social media platforms actively resist archiving; even when preservation is possible, curators are faced with a dilemma between capturing user experiences and capturing platform data. Navigating this challenge will surely be a major priority for the profession going forward.

While perhaps no substitute for meeting in person, #WeMissiPRES nonetheless succeeded in bringing the international digital preservation community together in a shared celebration of the progress being made in the field, successfully bridging the gap between 2019 and 2021, and laying the foundations for next year’s conference.

 

#WeMissiPRES was held online from 22nd-24th September 2020. For more information, and for recordings of the talks and panel sessions, see the event page on the DPC website.

Archiving web content related to the University of Oxford and the coronavirus pandemic

21st century, Digital archives, Modern, Web Archives, ,

Since March 2020, the scope of collection development at the Bodleian Libraries’ Web Archive has expanded to also focus on the coronavirus pandemic: how the University of Oxford, and wider university community have reacted and responded to the rapidly changing global situation and government guidance. The Bodleian Libraries’ Web Archive team have endeavoured (and will keep working) to capture, quality assess and make publicly available records from the web relating to Oxford and the coronavirus pandemic. Preserving these ephemeral records is important. Just a few months into what is sure to be a long road, what do these records show?

Firstly, records from the Bodleian Libraries’ Web Archive can demonstrate how university divisions and departments are continually adjusting in order to facilitate core activities of learning and research. This could be by moving planned events online or organising and hosting new events relevant to the current climate:

Capture of http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/ 24 May 2020 available through the Bodleian Libraries’ Web Archive. Wayback URL https://wayback.archive-it.org/2502/20200524133907/https://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/global-media-policy-seminar-series-victor-pickard-on-media-policy-in-a-time-of-crisis/

Captures of websites also provide an insight to the numerous collaborations of Oxford University with both the UK government and other institutions at this unprecedented time; that is, the role Oxford is playing and how that role is changing and adapting. Much of this can be seen in the ever evolving news pages of departmental websites, especially those within Medical Sciences division, such as the Nuffield Department of Population Health’s collaboration with UK Biobank for the government department of health and social care announced on 17 May 2020.

The web archive preserves records of how certain groups are contributing to coronavirus covid-19 research, front line work and reviewing things at an extremely  fast pace which the curators at Bodleian Libraries’ Web Archive can attempt to capture by crawling more frequently. One example of this is the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine’s Oxford Covid-19 Evidence Service – a platform for rapid data analysis and reviews which is currently updated with several articles daily. Comparing two screenshots of different captures of the site, seven weeks apart, show us the different themes of data being reviewed, and particularly how the ‘Most Viewed’ questions change (or indeed, don’t change) over time.

Capture of https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/ 14 April 2020 available through the Bodleian Libraries’ Web Archive. Wayback URL https://wayback.archive-it.org/org-467/20200414111731/https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/

Interestingly, the page location has slightly changed, the eagle-eyed among you may have spotted that the article reviews are now under /oxford-covid-19-evidence-service/, which is still in the web crawler’s scope.

Capture of https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/ 05 June 2020 available through the Bodleian Libraries’ Web Archive. Wayback url https://wayback.archive-it.org/org-467/20200605100737/https://www.cebm.net/oxford-covid-19-evidence-service/

We welcome recommendations for sites to archive; if you would like to nominate a website for inclusion in the Bodleian Libraries’ Web Archive you can do so here. Meanwhile, the work to capture institutional, departmental and individual responses at this time continues.

Old Ideas, New Technologies: Historical and Vintage Festivals in the UK Web Archive

21st century, Digital archives, Modern, Uncategorized, Web Archives

Festivals are wonderful events that can often involve thousands of people, united by their shared love for a common activity or theme. The UK Web Archive seeks to capture, and record these often colourful and creative demonstrations of human culture and creativity.

Some Festivals are very large and documented, such as Glastonbury which often attracts over a 100,000 people. However, there are also a number of smaller and more specific festivals which are less well known outside of their local communities and networks, such as the Shelswell History Festival. However, the internet has helped level the playing field, and given these smaller festivals an opportunity to publicise their events far beyond the reaches of their traditional borders and boundaries. And this has allowed archivists such as myself to find and add these festivals to the UK Web Archive.

(The Festivals Icon on the UK Web Archive Website)

Historical and Vintage Festivals

One of the most personally intriguing parts of the UK Web Archive festivals collection for me is Historical and Vintage festivals. These festivals rarely attract the level of media attention that a high profile music festival featuring the world’s biggest pop stars would enjoy. However, the UK Web Archive, is about diversity, inclusivity, and finding value in all parts of society. People who attend, organise, and take part in historical and vintage festivals form part of a collective effort which often results in a website that helps chronicle their enthusiasm.

Thus far we have found forty eight different historical and vintage festivals that take place in the United Kingdom. These festivals are broad and varied, and celebrate a multitude of things. This includes Newport Rising which celebrates the 1839 Chartist rebellion, the Lupton House Festival of History which celebrates a historic house, and Frock Me! Which is a vintage fashion fair. Every single one of these festivals is unique and specific in their own way, but they do have something in common. They all celebrate history and the past, and are characterised by a charming sense of nostalgia and remembrance.

While the website is no substitute for attending in person, they often include:

• Basic information about the festival’s time, place, and theme.
• An array of photographs.
• Anecdotes about the events.
• Information about the festivals donors and supporters.
• And additional information, such as attendance policies and rules etc.

A notable feature of these websites is how they use relatively new technologies to organise events which celebrate old events, places, and themes. This indicates a fantastic synergy between the heritage sector, and modern technology.

Curating the UK Web Archive’s Mental Health Collection

21st century, Modern, Web Archives, ,

The UK Web Archive’s Mental Health, Social Media and the Internet collection  seeks to document the changing conversation surrounding mental health, social media and the internet by capturing UK-based websites for posterity.

Developing the Mental Health Collection

As well as including webpages which highlight the negative impact of social media on mental health, the mental health collection also serves to document online initiatives including web pages and social media platforms which are changing the conversation and helping to tackle the stigma surrounding mental health. Examples of sites within the mental health collection include:

  • HeadsTogether, a mental health initiative setup and run by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry incorporating a campaign to change the dialogue surrounding mental health and raise funds to provide new mental health services.
  • The Mix provides an important source of mental health information and advice for people under twenty-five, tackling topics such as anxiety and depression, self-care and counselling.
  • The Mental Health First Aid England Instagram account (mhfaengland) serves to raise mental health literacy through a series of eye-catching posts including: photographs, drawings and info graphics which promote self-care and good mental health.
  • The Mental Health Foundation is a UK charity which aims to help people to understand, protect and sustain good mental health as seen through their online Twitter page

Help us grow our collections

The mental health collection can become a richer resource with your help. You could see your site suggestions preserved in the UK Web Archive by nominating them here.