Tag Archives: webarchives

Advancing and expanding access to our archives

Helping to navigate the Bodleian Libraries’ vast archives.

I am thrilled to be working on a major initiative by the Bodleian Libraries to prepare for the introduction of an online circulation system for the Bodleian’s vast collection of archive and manuscript materials. I grew up in a family avid about history and I went on to study history at university—so it’s an incredible privilege to be able to contribute to this work which will benefit readers, researchers and members of the public from all around the world.

My role at the Weston Library includes barcoding all the material stored there, uploading this information into our online systems, and contributing to the conservation and re-housing of collections. The work underway behind the scenes is a very significant project that will contribute to widening access to the Bodleian Libraries’ Special Collections. It’s energising to think that I am contributing to making all this material more accessible for as wide an audience of readers and scholars as possible. I am conscious that archival material is meaningful, powerful, and sometimes contested, and I am motivated by the idea I am contributing to a project which will allow a greater number of people to provide rigorous, progressive and exciting views of the past and its influence on the present.

One of the main privileges of my job is that I have the opportunity to work with all the collections in the Library. As I scamper around the Library’s many compartments to barcode the collections held there, I encounter material from all the Weston’s collections—medieval manuscripts, music archives, modern manuscripts, rare books, and maps from around the world. In the above photo, you can see me (please forgive the scruffy lockdown hair) preparing to put labels on each of the shelves in the Weston Library. I did this as the staff at the Weston came back to Library after the most recent lockdown, and the aim was to help my colleagues and I navigate the Library’s compartments to find materials—it can get quite labyrinthine! The coronavirus pandemic affected the Bodleian Libraries’ workings significantly, but through it all the Library always strived to “keep Oxford reading”. The project to which I am contributing was inevitably delayed by the pandemic because it involves a lot of work which can only be done onsite, but now a number of colleagues in the department are contributing to the project to catch up lost time and get it done!

Hopefully this has provided you with a glimpse of the daily inner-workings of the Bodleian and how we are working to make things accessible!

UK Web Archive mini-conference 2020

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/

 

Developing collections on Gender Equality at the UK Web Archive

The Gender Equality collection

The UK web archive Gender Equality collection and its themed subsections provide a rich insight into attitudes and approaches towards gender equality in contemporary UK society and culture. This was previously discussed in my last blog post about the collection, which you can read here.

Curating the collection

A great deal of the discussion and activity relating to gender equality occurs predominantly in an online space. This means that as a curator for the Gender Equality collection, the harvest is plenty! The type of content being collected by the UK Web Archive includes:

Of course there is some crossover, not only regarding the type of content but also within subsections of the gender equality collection.

This image is made available and reproduced by CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0. [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/legalcode]

Specifically, I find the event sites in the collection really interesting. As well as documenting that the event(s) even existed and happened in the first place, they can give us a snapshot of who organised the event, as well as who the intended audience were. Also, the collection exhibits the evolution of websites related to gender equality over time (which can be very speedy indeed when it comes to sites like twitter accounts!), and the changing priorities, trends, initiatives and more that can tell us about attitudes towards gender equality in the UK. These kinds of websites are being created by and engaged with by humans right now.

Nominate a website!

The endeavour of the UK Web Archive never stops – if you would like to help grow the Gender Equality collection (or indeed, any other collections) click here to nominate a website to save. Go on…whilst you’re at it, you can explore the UK Web Archive’s funky new interface!

 

Image reference: Workers Solidarity Movement (2012) March for Choice

 

Oxford LibGuides: Web Archives

Web archives are becoming more and more prevalent and are being increasingly used for research purposes. They are fundamental to the preservation of our cultural heritage in the interconnected digital age. With the continuing collection development on the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive and the recent launch of the new UK Web Archive site, the web archiving team at the Bodleian have produced a new guide to web archives. The new Web Archives LibGuide includes useful information for anyone wanting to learn more about web archives.

It focuses on the following areas:

  • The Internet Archive, The UK Web Archive and the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive.
  • Other web archives.
  • Web archive use cases.
  • Web archive citation information.

Check out the new look for the Web Archives LibGuide.

 

 

Subcultures as Integrative Forces in East-Central Europe 1900 – present: a Bodleian Libraries’ Web Archive record

A problem, and a solution in action:

The ephemeral nature of internet content (the average life of a web page is 100 days – illustrating that websites do not need to be purposefully deleted to vanish) is only one contributing factor to data loss. Web preservation is high priority;  action is required. This is a driver for not only Bodleian Libraries’ Web Archive, but digital preservation initiatives on a global scale.

However, today I would like to share the solution in action, an example from BLWA’s University of Oxford Collection: Subcultures as Integrative Forces in East-Central Europe 1900 – present.

On the live web, attempts to access the site are met with automatic redirects to BLWA’s most recent archived capture (24 Jan. 2017). The yellow banner indicates it is part of our archive. Image from http://wayback.archive-it.org/2502/20170124104518/http://subcultures.mml.ox.ac.uk/home.html

Subcultures is a University of Oxford project, backed by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, which through its explorative redefinition of ‘sub-cultures’ aims to challenge the current way of understanding simultaneous identification forms in the region of Eastern Europe through a multi-disciplinary methodology of social anthropology, discourse analysis, historical studies and linguistics. The project ran from 2012-2016.

The Subcultures website is an incredibly rich record of the project and it’s numerous works.  It held cross-continent collaborative initiatives including lectures, international workshops and seminars, as well as an outreach programme including academic publications. Furthermore, comparative micro-studies were conducted in parallel with main collaborative project: Linguistic Identities: L’viv/Lodz, c.1900; Myth and Memory: Jews and Germans, Interwar Romania; Historical Discourses: Communist Silesia and Discursive Constructions: L’viv and Wroclaw to present. The scope and content of the project, including key questions, materials, past and present events and network information is* all hosted on http://subcultures.mml.ox.ac.uk/home.html.

Was*. The site is no longer live on the internet.

However, as well as an automatic re-direction to our most recent archival copy, a search on Bodleian Libraries’ Web Archive generates 6 captures in total:

Search results for Subcultures within BLWA. Image from https://archive-it.org/home/bodleian?q=Subcultures

The materials tab of the site fully functions in the archived capture: you are able to listen to the podcasts and download the papers on theory and case studies as PDF versions.

The use of Subcultures

To explore the importance of web-archiving in this context, let us think about the potential use(rs) of this record and the implications if the website were no longer available:

As the  project comprised a wider outreach programme alongside its research, content such as PDF publications and podcasts were available for download, consultation and further research. The website platform means that these innovative collaborations and the data informed by the primary methodology are available for access. This is of access to the public on a global scale for education and knowledge and interaction with important issues – without even elaborating on how academics, researchers, historians and the wider user community will benefit from the availability of the materials from this web archive. Outreach by its very nature demands an unspecified group of people to lend its services to help.

Listening to the podcast of the project event hosted in Krakow: ‘Hybrid Identity’ in 2014. Rationale, abstracts and biographies from the workshop can also be opened. Image from http://wayback.archive-it.org/2502/20170124104618/http://subcultures.mml.ox.ac.uk/materials/workshop-krakow-hybrid-identity-september-2014.html

Furthermore, the site provides an irreplaceable record of institutional history for University of Oxford as a whole, as well as its research and collaborations. This is a dominant purpose of our University of Oxford collection. The role of preserving for posterity cannot be underplayed. Subcultures provides data that will be used, re-used and of grave importance for decades to come, and also documents decisions and projects of the University of Oxford. For example, the outline and rationale of the project is available in full through the Background Paper – Theory, available for consultation through the archived capture as it would be through the live web. Biographical details of contributors are also hosted on the captures, preserving records of people involved and their roles for further posterity and accountability.

Building on the importance of access to research: internet presence increases scholarly interaction. The scope of the project is of great relevance, and data for research is not only available from the capture of the site, but the use of internet archives as datasets are expected to become more prominent.

Participate!

Here at BLWA the archiving process begins with a nomination for archiving: if you have a site that you believe is of value for preserving as part of one of our collections then please do so here. The nomination form will go to the curators and web-archivists on the  BLWA team for selection checks and further processing. We would love to hear your nominations.

Bountiful Harvest: Curation, Collection and Use of Web Archives

The theme for the ARA Annual Conference 2017 is: ‘Challenge the Past, Set the Agenda’. I was fortunate enough to attend a pre-conference workshop in Manchester, ran by Lori Donovan and Maria Praetzellis from The Internet Archive, about the bountiful harvest that is web content, and the technology, tools and features that enable web archivists to overcome the challenges it presents.

Part I – Collections, Community and Challenges

Lori gave us an insight into the use cases of Archive-it partner organisations to show us the breadth of reasons why other institutions archive the web. The creation of a web collection can be for one of (or indeed, all) the following reasons:

  • To maintain institutional history
  • To document social commentary and the perspectives of users
  • To capture spontaneous events
  • To augment physical holdings
  • Responsibility: Some documents are ONLY digital. For example, if a repository upholds a role to maintain all published records, a website can be moved into the realm of publication material.

When asked about duplication amongst web archives, and whether it was a problem if two different organisations archive the same web content, Lori put forward the argument that duplication is not worrisome. The more captures of a website is good for long term preservation in general – in some cases organisations can work together on collaborative collecting if the collection scope is appropriate.

Ultimately, the priority of crawling and capturing a site is to recreate the same experience a user would have if they were to visit the live site on the day it was archived. Combining this with an appropriate archive frequency  means that change over time can also be preserved. This is hugely important: the ephemeral nature of internet content is widely attested to. Thankfully, the misconception that ‘online content will be around forever’ is being confronted. Lori put forward some examples to illustrate the point for why the archiving of websites is crucial.

In general, a typical website lasts 90-100 days before one of the following happens:

  1. The content changes
  2. The site URL moves
  3. The content disappears completely

A study was carried out on the Occupy Movement sites archived in 2012. Of 582 archived sites, only 41% were still live on the web as of April 2014. (Lori Donovan)

Furthermore, we were told about a 2014 study which concluded that 70% of scholarly articles online with text citations suffered from reference rot over time. This speaks volumes about preserving copies in order for both authentication and academic integrity.

The challenge continues…

Lori also pointed us to the NDSA 2016/2017 survey which outlines the principle concerns within web archiving currently: Social media, (70%); Video, (69%) and Interactive media and Databases, (both 62%).  Any dynamic content can be difficult to capture and curate, therefore sharing advice  and guidelines amongst leaders in the web archiving community is a key factor in determining successful practice for both current web archivists, and those of future generations.

Part II – Current and Future Agenda

Maria then talked us through some key tools and features which enable greater crawling technology, higher quality captures and the preservation of web archives for access and use:

  • Brozzler. Definitely my new favourite portmanteau (browser + crawler = brozzler!), brozzler is the newly developed crawler by The Internet Archive which is replacing the combination of heritrix and umbra crawlers. Brozzler captures http traffic as it is loaded, works with YouTube in order to improve media capture and the data will be immediately written and saved as a WARC file. Also, brozzler uses a real browser to fetch pages, which enables it to capture embedded urls and extract links.
  • WARC. A Web ARChive file format is the ISO standard for web archives. It is a concatenated file written by a crawler, with long term storage and preservation specifically in mind. However, Maria pointed out to us that WARC files are not constructed to easily enable research (more on this below.).
  • Elasticsearch. The full-text search system does not just search the html content displayed on the web pages, it searches PDF, Word and other text-based documents.
  • solr. A metadata-only search tool. Metadata can be added on Archive-it at collection, seed and document level.

Supporting researchers now and in the future

The tangible experience and use of web archives where a site can be navigated as if it was live can shed so much light on the political and social climate of its time of capture. Yet, Maria explained that the raw captured data, rather than just the replay, is obviously a rich area for potential research and, if handled correctly, is an inappropriable research tool.

As well as the use of Brozzler as a new crawling technology, Archive-it research services offer a set of derivative data-set files which are less complex than WARC and allow for data analysis and research. One of these derivative data sets is a Longitudinal Graph Analysis (LGA) dataset file which will allow the researcher to analyse the trend in links between urls over time within an entire web collection.

Maria acknowledged that there are lessons  to be learnt when supporting researchers using web archives, including technical proficiency training and reference resources. The typology of the researchers who use web archives is ever growing: social and political scientists, digital humanities disciplines, computer science and documentary and evidence based research including legal discovery.

What Lori and Maria both made clear throughout the workshop was that the development and growth of web archiving is integral to challenging the past and preserving access on a long term scale. I really appreciated an insight into how the life cycle of web archiving is a continual process, from creating a collection, through to research services, whilst simultaneously managing the workflow of curation.

When in Manchester…

Virtual Archive, Central Library, Manchester

I  couldn’t leave  Manchester without exploring the John Rylands Library and Manchester’s Central Library. In the latter, this interactive digital representation of a physical archive combined choosing a box from how a physical archive may be arranged, and then projected the digitised content onto the screen once selected. A few streets away in Deansgate I had just enough time in John Rylands to learn that the fear of beards is called Pogonophobia. Go and visit yourself to learn more!

Special collections reading room, John Rylands Library, Manchester

Web Archiving Week 2017 – “Pages for kids, by kids”

Yesterday I was lucky enough to attend a day of the Web Archiving Week 2017 conferences in Senate House, London along with another graduate trainee digital archivist.

A beautiful staircase in Senate House

Every session I attended throughout the day was fascinating, but Ian Milligan’s ‘Pages by kids, for kids’: unlocking childhood and youth history through the GeoCities web archive stood out for me as truly capturing part of what makes a web archive so important to society today.

Pages by kids, for kids

GeoCities, for those unfamiliar with the name, was a website founded in 1994 from which anyone could build their own free website which would become part of a ‘neighbourhood’. Each neighbourhood was themed for a particular topic, allowing topic clusters to form from created websites. GeoCities was shut down in Europe and the US in 2009, but evidence of it still exists in the Internet Archive.

Milligan’s talk focused particularly on the Enchanted Forest neighbourhood between 1996 and 1999. The Enchanted Forest was dedicated to child-friendliness and was the only age based neighbourhood, and as such had extra rules and community moderation to ensure nothing age inappropriate was present.

“The web was not just made by dot.com companies”

The above image shows what I think was one of the key points from the talk, a quote from the New York Times, March 17th 1997
“The web was not just made by dot.com companies, but that eleven-year-old boys and grandmothers are also busy putting up Web sites. Of course, the quality of these sites varies greatly, but low-cost and even free home page services are a growing part of the on-line world.”

The internet is a democracy, and to show a true record of how and why it has been used it necessarily involves people – not just businesses. By having GeoCities websites within the Internet Archive, it’s possible to access direct evidence of how people were using the internet in the late part of the 20th century, but, as Ian Milligan’s talk explained, it also allows access to direct evidence of childhood and youth culture forming on the internet.

Milligan pointed out that access to evidence of childhood and youth culture is rare, normally historical evidence comes in the form of adults remembering their time as children or from researchers studying children, but something produced by a child for other children would rarely make it into a traditional archive. Within the trove of archived GeoCities websites, however, children producing web content for children is clearly visible. From this, it is possible to examine what constituted popular activities for children on GeoCities in the late 20th century.

Milligan noted one major activity within the Enchanted Forest centred around an awards culture, wherein a popular site would award users based on several web page qualities such as no personal identifiable information, working links and loading times of less than one minute. Some users would create their own awards to present to people, for example an award for finding all the Winnie the Pooh words in a word search. His findings showed that 15% of Enchanted Forest websites had a dedicated awards page.

A darker side of a child-centric portion of the web was also revealed in the Geokidz club. On the surface, the Geokidz Club appeared to be an unofficial online clubhouse where children could share poetry and book reviews, they could chat and take HTML lessons – but these activities came at the price of a survey which contained questions about the lifestyles of the child’s parents (the type of information would appeal to advertisers). This formed part of one of the first internet privacy court cases due to the data being obtained from children and sold on without proper informed consent.

It was among my favourite talks of the day, and showed how much richer our understanding of the recent past can be using web archives, as well as the benefit to researchers of the history of youth and childhood.
It felt particularly relevant to me, as someone who spent her teen years on the internet watching, and being involved in, youth culture happening online in the 2000s to know that online youth culture, which can feel very ephemeral, can be saved for future research in web archives.

A wall hanging in Senate House (made of sisal)

In truth, any talk I attended would have made an interesting topic for this blog – the entire day was filled with informative speakers, interesting presentations and monumental, hair-like wall hangings. But I felt Ian Milligan’s talk gave such a positive example of how the internet, and particularly web archives, can give a voice to those whose experiences might be lost otherwise.

Initiating conversation: let’s talk about web content (part 2)

Colin Harris, Superintendent of Special Collections reading rooms. Chosen site: cyndislist.com

‘I am a founding member of Oxfordshire Family History Society and I’ve long been interested in family history. As a phenomena it surged in popularity in the 1970’s. In about 1973 there was great curiosity (in OFHS) in Bicester as everyone was interested in the popular group, The Osmonds (who originated from Bicester!). Every county has a family history society and I would say it’s they who have done the lion’s share of the work. All of their work and indexing…it’s all grist to the mill in terms of recording names and events.

So the website I would like to have access to in 10 years’ time is cyndislist.com, which is one of the world’s largest databases for genealogy. In fact it’s been going for over 21 years already. This was launched on the 4th March 1996. The family history people have been right there from the very beginning, it’s been growing solidly since then; it’s fantastic. It covers 200 categories of subjects, it has links to 332,000 other websites, and it’s the starting point for any genealogical research. The ‘Cyndi’ is Cyndi Howell, an author in genealogy.

Almost every day the site is launching content that might be interesting in some particular subject. So just going back within the last couple of weeks: an article on Telling the Orphan’s story; Archive lab on how to preserve old negatives; The key to family reunion success and DNA: testing at a family reunion! Projects even go beyond individuals…they explore a Yellowstone wolf family. There is virtually nothing that is untouched. Anything with a name to it has potential for exploration.

To be honest, I haven’t been able to do any family history research since 1980, but I am hoping to do some later on this year (when I retire). All these years that have passed has meant that so much is available to be accessed over the internet

Actually I’d love to see genealogy and family history workers and volunteers getting more recognition for the fantastic amount of industrious and tech savvy work they do. Family history is something for people from all walks of life. Our history, your history, my history is something very personal. As I say, 21 years and going strong; I’d love to see the site going stronger still in 10 years’ time.’


 

Pip Willcox, Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship and Senior Researcher at Oxford e-Research. Chosen site: twitter.com

Twitter is an amazing tool that society has used to show the best of what humanity is at the moment…we share ideas, we share friendship, fun and joy, we communicate with others around the world, people help each other. But, it shows the worst of what humans can do. The news we see is just the tip of the iceberg – the levels of abuse that users, particularly minority groups, receive is appalling. Twitter is a fantastic place to meet people who think very differently from us, people who come from different backgrounds, have had different experiences, who live far from us, or close by but we might not otherwise have met. It is so rich, so full of potential, and some of what we do with it is amazing, yet some of what we do with it is appalling.

The question for the archive is “which Twitter?” There is the general feed, what you see if you don’t sign in. Then there are our individual feeds, where we curate our own filter bubbles, customizing what we see through our accounts. You can create a feed around a hashtag, an event, or slice it by time or location. All of these approaches will affect the version of Twitter we archive and leave for the future to discover.

These filter bubbles are not new: we have always lived in them, even if we haven’t called them that before. Last year there was an experiment where a series of couples who held diametrically opposing views switched Twitter accounts and I found that, and their thoughtful response to it fascinating.

Projects like Cultures of Knowledge, for example, which is based at the History Faculty here at the University of Oxford, traces early modern correspondence. This resource lets you search for who was writing to whom, when, where, and the subjects they were discussing. It’s an enormously rich, people-centred view of the history of ideas and relationships across time and space, and of course it points readers on in interesting directions, to engage closely with the texts themselves. This is possible because the letters were archived and catalogued over the years, over the centuries by experts.

How are we going to trace the conversations of the late 20th and the early 21st centuries? The speed at which ideas flow is faster than ever and their breadth is global. What will future historians make of our age?

I’m interested from a future history as well as a community point of view. The way we are using Twitter has already changed and tracking its use, reach, and power seems to me well worth recording to help us understand it now, and to help explain an aspect of our lives to future societies. For me, Twitter makes the world more familiar, and anything that draws us together as a global community, that reinforces our understanding that we share one planet, that what we have in common vastly outweighs what divides us, and that helps us find ways to communicate is a good and a necessary thing.’

 


 

Will Shire, Library Assistant, Philosophy and Theology Faculty Library. Chosen site: wikipedia.org

‘It’s one of the sites I use the most…it has all of human knowledge. I think it’s a cool idea that anyone can edit it – unlike a normal book it’s updated constantly. I feel it’s derided almost too much by people who automatically think it’s not trustworthy…but I like the fact that it is a range of people coming together to edit and amend this resource. As a kid I bothered my mum all the time with constant questioning of ‘Why is this like this, why does it do that. Nowadays if you have a question about anything you can visit wikipedia.org. It would be really interesting to take a snapshot of one article every month or week in order to see how much it changes through user editing.

 Also, I studied languages and it is extremely useful for learning new vocabulary as the links at the side of the article can take you to the content in other available languages. You can quite easily look at different words or use it as a starter to take you to different articles in other languages that aren’t English.’


 

 

 

 

Why archive the web?

Here at the Bodleian Libraries’ Web Archive (BLWA), the archiving process starts with a nomination – either by our web curators or by you, the public. The nominated URLs the BLWA team then select for archiving are those specifically identified as being of lasting value and significance for preservation.

Not only are the sites chosen from a preservation standpoint – we are also continually seeking to build up the scope and content of our 7 collections within the BLWA: University of Oxford; University of Oxford colleges; University of Oxford museums, libraries and archives; social sciences; arts and humanities; international and science, medicine and technology. Exactly like the use of a physical collection, the sites belonging to the web collection will be used for research, fact checking, discovery and collaboration. There can be no denying that the web is the platform on which so much of contemporary society occurs. In the future then, and indeed now, web archives are providing an insight into our history.

Anti-Apartheid Movement Archives – http://www.aamarchives.org/

The AAMA site is part of our international collection in the BLWA. Within this collection we have captured the aamarchives.org 7 times since 24th November 2015. This online platform is vital for digital access to further research, cross-cultural relationships and efforts towards understanding the history of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement 1959 – 1994. This capture has preserved the navigation and functionality of the site and links still resolve; for example the user community can still browse the archive, learn about campaigns and download resources. The date and time is clearly displayed in the banner at the top.

BLWA’s first capture of the online AAMA

This website can also be used and explored in conjunction with our related physical holdings. Here at the Bodleian Special Collections we have an amazing depth and range of physical material in the Anti-Apartheid Movement archive and our Commonwealth and African studies collections. You can browse the catalogue for this here.

This archived capture is fully functional, like a live site.

This is a tangible example of how digital preservation enhances and complements physical material and ensures records can reach a wider audience. How exciting it is that a researcher can consult manuscript or archived material, alongside captures of websites from the past in order to gain more of an insight and have a wider scope of substance to survey!

Web content like the aamarchives.org/ is not as stable as you might presume. A repository of web based collections enables future discovery of internet sites that are perhaps taken for granted due to the nature of our technological society; everything is just a tap or a click away. In fact, much of the material we interact with today is only available online. The truth is that web content is ephemeral: there is a very real threat that it can rapidly change and disappear altogether. Therefore web archiving initiatives are vital to preserve these valuable resources for good. Through these captures, provenance, arrangement and content have been preserved; and arguably most importantly of all – access.

Both individual collections and the web archive as a whole can be searched for a specific site, or browsed at leisure.

Growth of open access and web based initiatives mean that there is an ever increasing network of digital libraries on a global scale. There is no doubt that the practice of web archiving is a significant contribution towards ensuring knowledge for all. Access to the Internet enabling access to an ever growing knowledge depository is central to the integrity of educational and professional research, web archiving and on a larger scale, digital preservation.

Browse our collections in Bodleian Libraries’ Web Archive

Get involved and help preserve our history! Nominate a site to archive

Initiating conversation: let’s talk about web content (part 1)

To initiate conversation about preserving web content and to encourage people to think about why archiving the web is so important, I asked staff at the Bodleian Libraries to imagine the following: If you could choose just one website to have guaranteed access to in 10 years’ time what would it be – and why? Keep reading to discover staff answers and perspectives…

Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian, Bodleian Libraries. Chosen site: bodleian.ox.ac.uk

‘Obviously as somebody who is leading this institution, seeing its history reflected in the institutional website is so significant. If you go back to the archived captures of bodleian.ox.ac.uk that are accessible now through the Internet Archive it’s incredible not only to see evolution of the HTML site itself and the look and feel of it but just to see how it reflects the changes in the organisation since the 1990’s when the first Bodleian website was set up…which was actually the first library in the UK to have a website.

We can see the changes to the way the Bodleian Libraries reflect their public persona through the web but also the website is a useful proxy for how the organisation itself has changed: the organisational structure, the administrative arrangements, the policies and strategies, how the web is a reflection of those changes over the past 20 years is really interesting. And in 10 years’ time it would be over 30 years and there will be another decade of evolution, growth, change…the web is a very convenient place to see that at a glance. We obviously archive a large number of institutional and administrative records in paper and digital form but it’s a huge amount to wade through, whereas the web provides a very convenient lens to view our organisational past through. I can’t think of another way, so conveniently, to chart our history, our progress, our challenges and even some of the mistakes that we’ve made as an organisation over that time.

Our organisation as a whole changed dramatically in the year 2000 when we stopped being just the historic Bodleian Library and we were integrated with the departmental faculty libraries. We then changed our name to University of Oxford Library services, then back to the Bodleian. Through the website you can actually see that extraordinary change. It’s such a convenient way of getting a grip on our history’.


Lukasz Kowalski, Bodleian Library Reader Services, Weston Library. Chosen site: stackexchange.com

‘I was thinking “what’s the website with the most information in it?”. My initial thought was Wikipedia.org. But I could easily live without it if I had to, as probably most knowledge contained in it is available in print. My next thought was stackexchange.com. It facilitates an exchange of knowledge and collective problem-solving on a large scale, otherwise unattainable via printed media. It’s supported by a large community of users, including experts in their fields. Together with its sister sites, it covers virtually any discipline and questions that can be asked and answered. Stackexchange is a web of knowledge, but different from Wikipedia. Rather than being organised knowledge it is more organised thinking.

My background is in Physics and I have used this site to further my understanding of concepts which did not have clear explanations in textbooks, or when I wanted to check that my thinking about a solution to a given problem was on the same page as others.

I think it goes back to what, I guess, the internet was about in the first place: the exchange of knowledge and ideas, and such is the character of this site. It’s great to rely on good teachers if one has access to them – but it is wonderful that people from across the world can gain a deeper understanding of concepts and exchange ideas by connecting more readily with those who have the expertise.’


 

Sophie Quantrell, Library Assistant, Philosophy and Theology Faculty Library. Chosen site: youtube.com

‘I was thinking about youtube.com as a resource mainly because it’s so versatile. It can be used to display images, sound…I’ve seen some people use it for musical scores – putting musical scores alongside the sound and that sort of thing. I think it is a site that can be used almost for any purpose – so you’ve got the social aspect of it with the comments and the interaction as well as the instructional aspect. I learn sign language when I am not busy with other things [gestures around her at the library] so to be able to see and learn it through videos it is great…it’s much more difficult to tell what the signs are if all you’ve got are drawings on a piece of paper!

It can link to videos on so many different topics, like instructional TED talks. There are so many good quality resources online that get overlooked with all the cat videos. It also crosses cultural boundaries…you can upload and view videos in whatever language you want. You could post a video from Australia and someone could be watching it in Kazakhstan!’


Iram Safdar, Graduate Trainee Digital Archivist, Weston Library. Chosen site: wikipedia.org

Wikipedia has been the main source for my knowledge since I was a kid. It’s also provided me with countless hours of entertainment by following the breadcrumb trail of links and seeing where you end up! All sorts of hilarity ensues when you find a rogue edit by someone…I like that it is an open source resource.

Similarly, it shows you what society thinks about things and reveals how we view stuff…which I think in a broader sense is quite interesting.’


Keep an eye out for part 2 and more staff insights coming up on the Archives and Modern Manuscripts blog imminently…