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Information from the team at the UK Web Archive, the Library's premier resource of archived UK websites
The UK Web Archive, the Library's premier resource of archived UK websites
News and views from the British Library's web archiving team and guests. Posts about the public UK Web Archive, and since April 2013, about web archiving as part as non-print legal deposit. Editor-in-chief: Jason Webber. Read more
2020 Domain Crawl Update
By Andy Jackson, Web Archiving Technical Lead at the British Library
On the 10th of September the 2020 Domain Crawl got underway. The annual Domain Crawl usually takes about three months to complete, it visits UK published websites on a UK Top Level Domain (TLD) like .uk, .cymru, .scot, .london etc., any web content hosted on a server registered in the UK as well as all the records manually created by the UK Web Archive teams across the UK Legal Deposit Libraries.
Update on crawl management
Due to the billions of URLs involved, the Domain Crawl is the most technically difficult crawl we run. As the crawl frontier grows and grows, the strain starts to show, particularly on the disk space required to store all of the status information about the URLs that have been crawled or are awaiting crawling. Worst of all, we found some mysterious problems with how Heritrix3 manages this information, meant that we could not safely stop and restart long crawls. We could usually restart once, but if we restarted again strange errors would appear, and sometimes these would be serious enough to cause the whole crawl to fail. Fortunately, in the last year, we finally tracked this down and updated the Heritrix3 crawler so that it can be safely stopped and restarted multiple times.
This has made managing the crawler much easier, as we can stop and restart the crawl with confidence if we need to change the software or hardware setup. This makes managing things like disk space much less stressful.
Update on the crawl performance
In the initial phase of the crawl, we threw in the roughly 11 million web hostnames that we have seen in past crawls, which then got whittled down to about 7 million active hosts. After this bumpy start and some system tuning, the crawl settled down and has been pretty consistently processing 250-300 URLs per second. This is acceptable, but isn't quite as fast as we would like, so we are analysing the crawl while it runs to try and work out where the bottlenecks are.
What we have collected so far
The figure below shows the URLs collected over time.
Graph illustrating the number of URLs downloaded in the 2020 Domain Crawl
The rather jagged start shows where we were able to stop and start the crawl in order to tune the initial hardware setup, and the flatter 'pauses' later on are from other maintenance activities like growing the available disk space. The advantage of being able to re-tune the crawler as we go is shown by the way the line gets steeper over time, corresponding to the increased crawl rate.
In terms of bytes downloaded, we see a similar result:
Graph illustrating the number of TBs downloaded in the 2020 Domain Crawl
As you can see, we are rapidly approaching 90TB of downloaded data, which corresponds to roughly 50TB of compressed WARC.gz data.
Despite starting the crawl relatively late in the year (due to issues around the COVID-19 outbreak), we are making good and stable progress and are on track to download over two billion URLs by the end of the year.
Follow the UK Web Archive on Twitter for the latest updates on the Domain Crawl and other web archiving activities!
Posted by Helena Byrne at 9:34 AM
Collections, Contemporary Britain, Legal deposit, Web/Tech
Technorati Tags: 2020 Domain Crawl, Domain Crawl, UK Legal Deposit, UK Web Archive, Web Archiving
How Remembrance Day has Changed
By Liam Markey, PhD Student, University of Liverpool and the British Library
This blog examines how attitudes to Remembrance (or Armistice) day have changed and evolved over the course of the 20th century and beyond. Read the previous blog on 'Militarism and its role in the commemoration of British war dead' for background on the wider research project.
2020 marks 100 years since the erection of a permanent Cenotaph at Whitehall and the interment of the Unknown Warrior in his tomb at Westminster. Along with the 2-minute silence, which was first observed in 1919, and the adoption of the poppy as the symbol of British commemoration in 1921, these practices have been ever present over the past century; they have become intrinsic components of the British collective identity in what is, arguably, a relatively short period of time.
Alleviating suffering and grief
Initially, this commemoration of the dead of the First World War performed two distinct purposes: firstly, practices served to alleviate the suffering of those who had lost loved ones. The bodies of the fallen were not repatriated, so the erection of monuments extolling the sacrifices of the war dead served as focal points of grief and mourning in local communities. Secondly, Remembrancetide (the time of year in which British rituals of commemoration are enacted) was initially a period in which support for disabled ex-servicemen, and those left widowed or orphaned by the First World War, was to be generated. Through the sale of poppies or direct donations, the British public was able to provide financial support for those in need. Collective mourning, such as at the Cenotaph where the monarchy and politicians gathered, was a demonstration of unity and a national thanksgiving to the war dead.
Attitudes to commemoration are not static
Whilst commemorative practices have remained practically unchanged over the past 100 years (only the day on which they are observed has been altered, and for the duration of the Second World War national services were suspended), the same cannot be said for the historical context in which they have been enacted, nor for the thoughts and ideals of those who enact them.
Newspaper Analysis
Analysing the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror newspapers, I have been able to create a small "pseudo" historiography of British attitudes towards commemoration throughout the 20th Century. The text samples from the two newspapers that I have examined range from the 7th -14th November at ten-year intervals starting in 1928 and contain at least one mention of the terms "Armistice" or "Remembrance." The choice to search within this temporal parameter and for these specific terms was a conscious decision made so as to ensure that texts relating to both Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday were collected and available for analysis. The intervals between samples was a deliberate choice so that each text is taken from a year in which a tenth anniversary of the First World War took place and, in theory, when coverage of the war in the media would be at a heightened state.
The first text sample is taken from 1928, the ten-year anniversary of the signing of the Armistice in 1918 and provides the largest number of texts from any year. This is in most part due to the fact that the First World War was a relatively recent event at this point in time. The main emphasis of these texts is on how the British public can aid those left disabled by their experience of the First World War, either through donations to the British Legion's poppy appeal or by direct purchasing goods made by ex-servicemen. The issue of 'lasting peace' is also brought up several times, with many believing that ten years having passed without another World War proves that the cause so many British soldiers died fighting for was not in vain. At this point in time, when commemoration was in many ways an expression of a commitment to peace, the majority of the British public seemed convinced that it was fulfilling its purpose.
However, by 1938 the mood had shifted considerably. With another conflict looming there is less conviction in proclamations of the First World War having achieved this lasting peace. There is an increase in articles discussing the possibility of another war in the near future and the failings of the last 20 years in maintaining peace. There is a palpable anxiety present in the coverage of both the Mail and Mirror as British society faces the stark realisation that the lasting peace so many died for between 1914-18 is on the verge of dissolution.
By 1948 this anxiety had yet to subside, and despite another recent victory over Germany and her allies there is little celebration or indication that the Second World War had done a better job in achieving peace than the First had done as too little time had yet passed. This sample provides a much shorter number of texts concerned with commemoration, and I am drawn to Jay Winter's assertion that societies following the Second World War struggled to make sense of the carnage they had experienced as an explanation as to why this was the case:
The limits of language had been reached; perhaps there was no way adequately to express the hideousness and scale of the cruelties of the 1939-1945 war. (Winter, 1995, p.9)
In the wake of the First World War, commemorative practices were conceived so as to soothe the suffering of the bereaved and to attach value and meaning to the sacrifice of the war dead. The aftermath of the Second World War resulted in a disillusionment with this previous tradition as commemoration hinged on the maintenance of peace. Now it was clear that the 'peace' so many died to attain was a fiction, and perhaps the lack of coverage in this text sample is demonstrative of a contextual detachment felt in British society towards the commemoration of war. The overarching theme displayed by this text sample is that of a society disillusioned with the concept of war commemoration, yet perceived slights to tradition, such as "gigglers" at Whitehall, are still harshly condemned. Despite there being no overt celebration of the war dead, or victory in the two World Wars present in either paper, it is clear that the bare minimum of traditional commemorative practices were to still be respected and observed.
The texts from 1958 greatly resemble those of 1928, where it was believed that a sufficient period of time had passed since the ending of the First World War and thus it was acceptable to again assert that lasting peace had been achieved. There are a few texts that discuss this idea of lasting peace, specifically one in the Daily Mail titled What a Difference 27 Years Make, which argues that the contrast between the present and 1931, both being 13 years removed from a World War, proves that society is on the right track to avoiding another global conflict.
Another important focus of texts from this period is the issue of the "200,000," the last remaining veterans of the First World War, and what is perceived to be a lack of financial support from the government as they enter the later stages of their lives. After 1948, where overt reference to ex-servicemen in the texts was absent, this year's sample brings them back to the fore, reminiscent once more of 1928's sample. The difference here, however, is that the ex-servicemen mentioned in the texts collected prior to the Second World War focused on those who had been left disabled by their experiences of the First World War. In 1958, media coverage encompasses all ex-servicemen from the First World War due to their age – now that 40 years have passed since the Armistice, the advanced age of veterans now means they are all regarded as vulnerable and in need of assistance from the public, be they disabled as a result of the war or not.
Both 1968 and 1978 samples offer an insight to changing attitudes to the First World War in British society. The British mythology of the conflict that is firmly planted in modern popular imagination has its roots in the 1960s and 70s where a number of influential pieces of media were produced that transformed attitudes to the First World War.
Evident in both text samples is the widening divide between older and younger generations and their attitudes towards the commemoration of war, and wider ideas regarding the relevance of traditional commemorative rituals considering how much time had passed since the Armistice. Both newspapers wrestle with the idea that commemorative practices have become outdated and appeal only to a small minority of the population with personal connections to the First World War, with it being described as "too sentimental" to some. Despite these growing objections, large crowds are still in attendance at remembrance services, many of whom, as the Daily Mirror points out, are young people. These decades depict the future of commemorative tradition as being somewhat in doubt; with the Second World War receding into history, and the First even more so, there is a real feeling in the texts that the commemorative traditions conceived in the wake of the Armistice had started to become outdated.
By the late 1980s British interest in commemoration seems to have been reinvigorated, perhaps in no small part due to the Falklands Conflict of 1982, with both the 1988 and 1998 texts bearing a more nationalistic tone than previous samples. With memory of the First World War having all but passed from living memory, emphasis in the texts shifts from the personal stories of those who were directly affected by the conflict towards a more abstract concept of commemoration as an almost celebration of Britishness. Both newspapers in 1988 contain adverts from the British Legion that describe the observance of traditional commemorative practices as a "National Debt," and especially in the Daily Mail there is a vast increase in articles containing inflammatory and accusatory language directed at those who are not 100% committed to participation. Whilst in 1998, the question of whether today's youth are willing to die for their nation is repeated numerous times throughout Remembrancetide in the Daily Mail.
Leading into the 21st Century there is a sense that the initial meaning behind commemoration, which sought to provide support for those mourning the deaths of loved ones, has become outdated now that lived experience of the First World War has passed from the British population. There is a real danger that the language and symbols that vindicated the sacrifice of the war-dead in the wake of the conflict are more likely to inspire militaristic notions in the present day.
While brief, I hope this piece has demonstrated to some degree the fluid nature of British attitudes to commemoration in the 20th Century, and how these attitudes are somewhat representative of wider historical and social change. As my research moves forward it will be most interesting to see the relationship between 'micro' discourses and those disseminated by the British media.
Resources such as the UK Web Archive will prove invaluable in exploring these 'bottom up' approaches to commemoration, asking how language and symbols popularised in the wake of the First World War, such as the Remembrance Poppy, are reproduced within amateur online remembrance projects and how this usage potentially relates to issues such as nationalism and militarism. Often, mainstream representations of Remembrance focus on the unifying nature of commemoration, and it will be interesting to see whether analysis of materials produced by the average British citizen challenges or confirms this narrative.
UKWA First World War centenary collection - 900+ archived websites (or pages).
Posted by Jason Webber at 9:17 AM
Collections, Contemporary Britain, Research collaboration
A tale of two web archives: challenges of engaging web archival infrastructures for research
By Jessica Ogden, University of Bristol and Emily Maemura, University of Toronto
Web archives are quickly becoming a key source for studying the historical Web, with many recent projects and publications demonstrating the scholarly opportunities presented by national web archives, in particular. At the same time, research in and on national web archives presents a number of challenges for scholars - where a 'sociotechnical gap' (Ackerman 2000) can be observed between the needs of researchers and the affordances of web archives themselves.
In an effort to better understand the barriers to web archival use in research, our recent paper at the Engaging with Web Archives conference shares the results of a collaborative project which compares and contrasts our experiences of using two national web archives: the UK Web Archive and the Netarchive in Denmark. In 2018, Jessica undertook a three-month research placement with the British Library looking at the challenges and opportunities of using the UKWA for social science research. Around the same time, Emily also spent three months at the Danish National Web Archive, Netarchive, in collaboration with the Royal Library and the University of Aarhus in Denmark.
Based on our own interactions with these web archives, and interviews with staff and curators, alongside observations of web archiving activities, this paper proposes a conceptual framework that outlines the earliest stages of research alignment and engagement with national web archives. The concepts developed in the paper (orientating, auditing and constructing) provide an avenue for discussing the entanglement of researchers, curators and collections in the research process. In discussion, we make a number of observations regarding the challenges of this form of digital research - including how researchers must unpick the complex constraints of different web archives - and suggest possible ways that existing curatorial infrastructure (tools, people and curatorial knowledge and expertise) could be leveraged to better facilitate researcher engagement in future.
To learn more about our findings, check out the recording of our EWA 2020 presentation.
This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada Graduate Scholarship 767-2015-2217 and Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement. Additional funding was provided by a UKRI/Economic and Social Research Council, National Centre for Research Methods placement fellowship and research funds by the University of Southampton. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the generosity and support provided by staff and researchers at the UKWA, the British Library, the Royal Library and the NetLab at Aarhus University.
Posted by Jason Webber at 4:27 PM
The UK Web Archive website over time - 15 Years of UKWA
By Jason Webber, Web Archive Engagement Manager, The British Library
2020 marks 15 years of the UK Web Archive collecting websites. Like almost all websites, ours has been through a number of changes in that time. Web archives provide an important way to look at organisational, or personal, change over time. Let's see how things have developed for us and how this reflects the change and progress in our work.
UK Web Archive Consortium - 2004
When we started the web archiving project we did so as a group of institutions looking to capture at least some of the UK web for future historians and other researchers. At this time, due to the lack of a legislative framework, the UKWA contacted website publishers in advance, to gain their consent for archiving. At the same time, we requested public access to the archival copies of the websites via the UK Web Archive. See the archived version of this website.
UK Web Archive - 2008
The collection by this time had evolved in several ways. Some of the original consortium members, such as The UK National Archives (UK Government Web Archive), started their own web archive collections.
Another striking (and rare for web archives) element at this time was the introduction of a 'full text search'. Users could, for the first time, search any word or phrase on any website available through this portal. See the archived version of this website.
The website itself, like the archive, grew and evolved as the collection went from hundreds of websites to thousands. The number of individual curated collections (known then as 'special collections') also grew. Also, some exciting new features and projects were introduced, such as - Memento (a facility for seeing which other web archives hold a given web page), ngram search, Tag clouds, 3D walls and others. See the archived version of this website.
In 2013 the scope of the UK Web Archive changed dramatically with the introduction of Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations that allow for the collection of all UK digitally published material. The archive went from collecting thousands of websites to millions each year. These new 'Legal Deposit' archives, however, could only be viewed in the reading rooms of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries through library terminals.
One impact of this is that from 2013 until the re-launch of this website in 2018 users might have to look at both a Library catalogue AND www.webarchive.org.uk to see everything available.
This new iteration of the website offered, for the first time, a way to discover everything available in the web archive collection. See the archived version of this website.
What is your own website history?
Are you able to tell your own personal or organisational website history? What is the earliest version of your website that is in a web archive and what might be missing? Use Mementoweb to look across a range of web archives (including UKWA). Tell us what you find on Twitter.
People don't always immediately see the longterm value in keeping the things that they create. Sometimes it is only years later that the worth is felt. Websites are the public representation of ourselves (or of an organisation) and the fact that this changes over time deserves the opportunity to be documented.
If you have a UK website, please nominate it for inclusion in the UK Web Archive here: www.webarchive.org.uk/nominate
On World Digital Preservation Day, the UK Web Archive and the 'Children of Lockdown' capture the moment for future generations
By Charlotte McMillan, Founder, Storychest
Introduction from Nicola Bingham, Lead Curator, Web Archiving, British Library
Today is World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD), a celebration of all things digital preservation which is organised by the Digital Preservation Coalition and held annually on the first Thursday of November.
To mark today's WDPD, the UK Web Archive is highlighting the 'Children of Lockdown' project, a recent addition to the Archive which exemplifies the diversity of voices captured in the Archive and highlights the importance of preserving our digital legacy.
Charlotte McMillan, founder of Storychest and curator of the 'Children of Lockdown' project writes:
"Lockdown has been like a question mark in the middle of a sentence. Unexpected, confusing and stressful", observes Yilu, 14, from London, in one of 200 thoughtful and powerful responses to lockdown and Covid19 from children aged 3 to 17, spanning the whole of United Kingdom and from as far afield as Australia.
In July this year, children were asked to contribute to a 'digital time capsule' to be included by the British Library in the UK Web Archive's Covid19 collection. The resulting group of stories, poems and artwork, is insightful and poignant, and whilst it reflects anxiety and, in some cases, profound sadness, it is also imbued with humour, imagination and enduring hope. Disruption to education, distancing from friends and family and uncertainty about the future, are themes which have been captured through the lenses and with the clarity of the voices of the children themselves, a generation whose lives have been affected by the pandemic in so many ways.
The 'Children of Lockdown' collection was initiated by Charlotte McMillan, mother of 3 boys and founder of Storychest, the private digital memory box app. Witnessing the impact of the upheaval of lockdown restrictions, she encouraged her own children to record their impressions of this unprecedented period of time.
Charlotte studied history at university and remembers the amazement she felt at exploring on microfiche newspaper articles stored by the British Library from a century ago to help her to understand how events were perceived contemporaneously. She wanted to enable today's children to record their thoughts and impressions in a lasting way, to help future generations to understand what they were going through. So, Charlotte, together with a group of 5 British children's authors put the word out to schools and other groups for children's submissions.
The children have captured enduring and iconic snapshots like the 'clap for carers', PE with Joe Wicks, the run on loo paper, empty streets and the emergence of nature, including goats taking over Llandudno.
Maddy, 15, from London drew herself in monochrome, with the now all too familiar accessory of a mask, eyes peering knowingly at the viewer.
Tiggy, 10, from Kent felt trapped and isolated away from her friends, so drew herself behind prison bars in her own home, but added hope to her work by overlaying a rainbow in pastels.
Charlotte's son Sholto, 14, pictured himself caught inside his phone, referencing the use of devices in lockdown as both a window to the outside world and a trap.
There are stories of imagination and escapism: Flora, 10, from Wallingford likened the virus to a wandering wolf 'pacing the fence line' outside her home; Joseph, 8, from Nottingham, missing playing football, invented games using Lego, "Harry Potter, racing through on his broomstick to smash it in the goal. Godzilla in goal, nobody could beat him".
Incredibly brave Emma, 11, from Derbyshire, was being treated for a brain tumour during lockdown. She reflected on happy moments sat on a best friend's drive for a chat and also describes sadness that her mum was not able to be with her, due to the restrictions, when she rang the hospital bell to mark the end of her treatment.
Siomha, 11, from London grieves for the death of a beloved great uncle, who had been known as the 'baby whisperer' for his calming effect on her as a baby: "Where is my baby whisperer? This time he cannot stop the tears, because this time I weep for him."
And yet, through it all, there is hope. Maddy, 15, from Exeter, creates a lockdown mural in her bedroom to show hope for her family and friends. Saanvi, 11, from Leamington Spa, remembering Dumbledore's words "Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light", reflects that "mankind will get through any crisis and discover positivity even where it seems impossible to find".
Kenzi, 12, from Chesterfield who is autistic and found lockdown to be a particularly anxious time, sums it up beautifully, in his poem 'Life in Lockdown':
When normality returns
2020 will be remembered
In our broken battered hearts
As the time the world finally united
By staying apart
The Children of Lockdown collection can be viewed in full at https://childrenoflockdown.storychest.com/
The UK Web Archive Coronavirus Collection can be viewed here: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/2975
Posted by Nicola Bingham at 9:10 AM
Contemporary Britain, Visual arts, Web/Tech
Curating culturally themed collections online: The Russia in the UK Collection, UK Web Archive
By Hannah Connell, Collaborative PhD Student, King's College London; British Library
I spoke about my position as a curator for the Russia in the UK curated collection as part of the recent Engaging with Web Archives conference (EWA), which was held online from the 21st-22nd of September 2020. This conference reflected the breadth of the web archiving community, bringing together speakers from researchers to librarians, as well as curators and web archiving teams from many different countries.
As always, it was inspiring to participate in such a welcoming event. Even online, the conference retained the collaborative atmosphere which has marked my experience of research in web archiving, allowing new researchers to interact with more experienced practitioners and encouraging questions and conversations between researchers, users and archivists.
The researcher-curated collection, Russia in the UK, is part of the UK Web Archive (UKWA). I was particularly pleased to have had the opportunity to present this curated collection, a resource on the Russian-speaking community in the UK, which was first started in November 2017. Such collections play an important role in making the wide range of material preserved in the UKWA more visible to researchers.
Curators are important to the preservation work of the UKWA. Curated collections are collected manually by curators and researchers with specialist knowledge in their field. The role of a curator in creating a UKWA collection involves identifying relevant websites to be included in a collection, and recording the metadata for these websites, including the translation and transliteration of titles and descriptions in other languages.
This collection is valuable both as a resource for further research, and as a means of questioning research practices. It is not possible to capture everything on the web, and collection curators ensure that a representative sample of websites for each thematic collection are selected. The practice of creating and maintaining a collection such as the Russia in the UK ultimately influences the shape of the collection and the online representation of the diasporic community it will come to reflect. As such, it is important for researchers and users to understand the decisions taken by curators in selecting and capturing websites.
My paper for EWA focused on the creation of a curation guide for curators of new curated collections. This draws on the ongoing process of curating the Russia in the UK collection, documenting both the provenance of this special collection and reflecting on this process as a model for future collections.
In documenting the creation of this collection, I hope to enable future researchers to explore and contribute to this record of the online activity of the Russian diaspora in the UK, and to question and develop the curatorial and research practices behind the curation of collections.
You can watch Hannah Connell's presentation on the EWA YouTube channel.
Posted by Helena Byrne at 10:36 AM
Collections, Contemporary Britain, Digital scholarship, Humanities, Legal deposit, Research collaboration, Web/Tech
Technorati Tags: Collaborations, Engaging with Web Archives, EWA Virtual, Russian Communities in the UK, Russian UK Web Space, UK Web Archive, Web Archive Research, Web Archives
LGBTQ+ Lives Online: Introducing the Lead Curators
By Steven Dryden, British Library LGBTQ+ Staff Network & Ash Green CILIP LGBTQ+ Network
In July 2020 the British Library, the UK Web Archive and CILIP LGBTQ+ Network relaunched the LGBTQ+ Lives Online web archive collection. We have received many nominations for new sites to be collected by the UK Web Archive and work has begun to re-tag many of the websites that have been collected since the UK Web Archive began collecting the UK web in 2005.
To mark two months since the project began, LGBTQ+ Lives Online leads Steven Dryden, of the British Library, and Ash Green, of CILIP LGBTQ+ Network write about the relevance of the World Wide Web to them as members of the LGBTQ+ community, and some of their collection highlights:
Steven he/him/his
Steven Dryden
I first encountered the internet in Las Vegas. It was the summer of 1998, I was 17 and my family had migrated from Newcastle Upon Tyne to the western world's party play pit in the Nevada desert. My friend, Lilian, was talking to someone in New York City about the band Depeche Mode through America Online (AOL).
Chat rooms were online spaces that allowed groups of people to join anonymously and had the options to talk and interact within a group or in private. Chatrooms quickly became a pivotal part of my small cohort of friends and I, the odd balls who didn't quite fit, as we were forming our identities in those formative late teen years, and trying to find our place in the world.
Later the same year on October 12, 1998 Matthew Shepard would die. A gay student at the University of Wyoming, Shepherd was beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on the night of October 6, 1998. AOL chatrooms formed the major part of how I found out about Shepherd, worked through my feelings about his murder, and was the first news story that I followed online.
The protections and general understanding of who the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community are has undergone radical change in the 22 years since I first encountered the internet. I'm interested to see what survives online of the change in language relating to the community, and what evidence remains in the UK Web Archive of the online discussion. Some websites that interest me in these first months of the project include:
The Campaign for Homosexual Equality: an organisation which led the way to legal reform in the UK, following the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which partial decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales.
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/20130505124828/http://www.c-h-e.org.uk/
Around the Toilet: a community engaged art project exploring the accessibility and culture of toilets for the LGBTQ+ community
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/20180606164959/https://aroundthetoilet.wordpress.com/
Asexual Visibility and Education Network: founded in 2001 with two distinct goals: creating public acceptance and discussion of asexuality and facilitating the growth of an asexual community
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/20150226230020/http://www.asexuality.org/home/
Ash (they/them)
When I was studying for my BA Information and Library Management degree in the early 1990s, the internet and World Wide Web weren't as high profile as they are now. I loved tech back then, and was into programming and creating databases as part of the degree. But I didn't really understand what the lecturers were talking about when they mentioned the internet. At the time I had no idea how important it would be to my coming out just over 20 years later, and what a positive impact it would have.
Thinking about the lead up to my coming out in 2017, without access to sites and forums related to trans/gender non-conforming lives in particular, I doubt I would have come out at all. But when I decided to look for guidance online, I found a huge amount of information that was overwhelming at first, but eventually this helped me understood where I fitted into the world. They included medical sites; statements from WHO and other health organisations highlighting that being trans wasn't a mental health issue; personal blogs and forums, talking about experiences and a variety of perspectives on what it means to be trans; finding out about non-binary, genderfluid, and genderqueer people experiences (I had no idea what these words meant); LGBTQ+ events; makeup and style tips; sites for face-to-face support groups and meetups, and sites for exhibitions such as the Museum of Transology and the Transworkers photography exhibition, which helped me understand that being trans is much broader than mainstream media would have the world believe.
Many sites were useful, but at the same time I came across quite a few that were more "Yes, this miracle herbal treatment really does change your hormones", and "You're only valid if you fit into trans box X or Y" that put my critical, digital literacy and research experience into practice. I also found supportive friends and allies, and I was able to share useful sites and sources of information I'd discovered to give them a better understanding of my experience. It's important that these sites should be a part of the UK Web Archive LGBTQ+ Lives Online collection. Not only because they have a relevance to the UK Web Archive in general, but from a personal perspective I feel that if they had such an impact on helping me find where I fit into the world, how many other people have they also had a similar positive impact upon?
The sites I've chosen below from the UK Web Archive have all had a personal impact upon myself.
Museum of Transology: The UK's most significant collection of objects representing trans, non-binary and intersex people's lives.
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/20201003091027/https://www.museumoftransology.com/
OutStories Bristol: Collecting and preserving the social history and recollections of LGBT+ people living in or associated with Bristol, England.
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/10000101000000/https://outstoriesbristol.org.uk/
Outline Surrey: Outline provides support to people with their sexuality and gender identity, including but not limited to the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and trans community of Surrey, primarily through a helpline, website and support groups.
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/en/archive/20160107134238/http://www.outlinesurrey.org/
Get involved with preserving UK LGBTQ+ Lives Online with the UK Web Archive
We can't curate the whole of the UK web on our own, we need your help to ensure that information, discussions, personal experiences and creative outputs related to the LGBTQ+ community are preserved for future generations. Anyone can suggest UK published websites to be included in the UK Web Archive by filling in our nominations form:
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/nominate
Collections, Contemporary Britain, Crowdsourcing, Legal deposit, LGBTQ+, Museums Pride, Web/Tech
Technorati Tags: British Library LGBTQ+ Staff Network, CILIP LGBTQ+ Network, LGBT Lives, LGBTQ+, Pride, UK Legal Deposit, Web Archiving
Digital archaeology in the web of links: reconstructing a late-90s web sphere
By Dr. Peter Webster, Independent Scholar, Historian and Consultant
The historian of the late 1990s has a problem. The vast bulk of content from the period is no longer on the live web; there are few, if any, indications of what has been lost – no inventory of the 1990s web against which to check. Of the content that was captured by the Internet Archive (more or less the only archive of the Anglophone web of the period), only a superficial layer is exposed to full-text search, and the bulk may only be retrieved by a search for the URL. We do not know what was never archived, and in the archive it is difficult to find what we might want, since there is no means of knowing the URL of a lost resource. Sometimes we need, then, to understand the archived web using only the technical data about itself that it can be made to disclose.
Niels Brügger has defined a web sphere as 'web material … related to a topic, a theme, an event or a geographic area'. My paper at the EWA conference presents a method of reconstructing a web sphere, much of which is lost from the live web and exists only in the Internet Archive: the web estate of the many conservative Christian campaign groups in the UK in the 1990s and early 2000s.
This method of web sphere reconstruction is based not on page content but on the relationships between sites, i.e., the web of hyperlinks. The method is iterative, and tracks back and forth between big data and small. Individual archived pages and directories, printed sources, the scholarly record itself, and even traces of previous unsuccessful attempts at web archiving come into play, as does a large dataset held by the British Library. From the more than 2 billion lines in the UK Host Link Graph dataset it is possible to extract the outlines of this particular web sphere.
You can watch Peter Webster's presentation on his website peterwebster.me.
Previous studies using a similar method are:
Webster, Peter. 2019. Lessons from cross-border religion in the Northern Irish web sphere: understanding the limitations of the ccTLD as a proxy for the national web. In The Historical Web and Digital Humanities: the Case of National Web domains, eds Niels Brügger & Ditte Laursen, 110-23. London: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/yms5-9v95
Webster, Peter. 2017. Religious discourse in the archived web: Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, and the sharia law controversy of 2008. In: The Web as History, eds Niels Brügger & Ralph Schroeder, 190-203. London: UCL Press. (Available Open Access at: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/84010)
Collections, Contemporary Britain, Digital scholarship, Humanities, Religion, Research collaboration, vanished site, Web/Tech
Technorati Tags: 1990s web space, Collaborations, Engaging with Web Archives, EWA Virtual, Host Link Graph JISC UK Web Domain Dataset (1996-2010), Internet Archive, JISC UK WEB DOMAIN DATASET (1996-2013), Religion, Religion on the web, UK Web Archive, UK Web Archive Open Data, Web Archive Research, Web Archives
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