SLA Europe was pleased to welcome Nicola Bingham, Lead Curator of Web Archiving in the Department of Collections, to share more about the history, curation practices, and research use cases of the UK Web Archive (UKWA).
The UK web is one of the most important aspects of the nation’s digital record, but it is extremely vulnerable with many websites frequently disappearing and being lost so the goal of preserving and providing access to those websites has become of urgent and strategic importance.
Established in 2004, the UK Web Archive is a partnership between the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries: the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Libraries, the University of Cambridge Library, and the Library of Trinity College Dublin.
Nicola shared more about the background of the UKWA, some of the challenges it currently faces, the scale and context of the UK Web Archive collection, in addition to the variety of projects that the UKWA is involved in, supporting researchers and academics across the country.
Further reading/useful links:
- UK Web Archive website: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/
- UK Web Archive blog: https://blogs.bl.uk/webarchive/index.html
- UK Web Archive Twitter: https://twitter.com/UKWebArchive
- UK Web Archive section of the BL Shared Repository: https://bl.iro.bl.uk/collections/d09fbc16-7a76-49db-a45f-16a99c30ae3e?locale=en
- International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) website: https://netpreserve.org/
- IIPC blog: https://netpreserveblog.wordpress.com/
- IIPC X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/NetPreserve