The Bodleian Libraries is involved in web archiving both through the Bodleian Libraries’ own web archive since 2011 , and – as one of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries – through the Legal Deposit UK Web Archive since 2013.
- What’s cooking in the web archives? — (Detail from painting by Jean-François Millet [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
A considerable amount of archivists’, curators’ and subject librarians’ time goes into this web archiving work, be it selecting websites for archiving, capturing and preserving web content, describing web archive resources or participating in web archiving strategy, collections management and outreach activities.
Current web archiving projects at the Bodleian include the further development of the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive, for example to capture audio files hosted on web servers, and curatorial work in the UK Web Archive context, such as the Easter Rising 1916 Web Archive and the EU Referendum website collection.
But why archive the web?
What’s on the internet will be there forever, won’t it? Haven’t we all be warned to be careful what we put on the internet, because all the information out there will still reveal awkward details of our first-year-at-university life when we are about to retire?
Unfortunately, for archivists, this is far from what really happens. In fact, websites are extremely ephemeral. They change and disappear at a fast rate.