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Building a Collection of the Historical UK Web for scholarly use
Helen Hockx-Yu
Head of Web Archiving, British Library

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The UK Web Domain
4th TLD after .com, .de and .net
Over 10 million .uk registered domain
UK organisations also use non .uk domain names (eg .com or .org) – scale unknown
Non-print Legal Deposit (since April 2013) applies to
the open (freely available) web: .uk and other UK-published (non .uk) websites, such as .com, .org…
also e-journals, e-books, news web pages and other digital publications, either by harvesting or mutual agreement on other delivery methods

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Web Archiving at the British Library
Collect UK digital heritage and provide continued access to archived web resources
Started web archiving in 2003: Open UK Web Archive
Selective, topical collections and key sites
Consortium sharing infrastructure and development effort; agreement on who collects what
Curating collections with organisations and researchers
Archiving UK Web for non-print Legal Deposit since April 2013: Legal Deposit UK Web Archive
Comprehensive national archive with on-site access only
Joint responsibility of six Legal Deposit Libraries (LDLs)

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Domain Crawl
News
Special collection
Special collection
Domain crawl:
•Broad sweep of UK domain
•Once or twice a year
Events & key sites and news:
•Events of UK interest
•High value, high impact sites
•National & regional news
Special Collection:
•Focused, thematic collections
•Support priority subjects
Key sites
Events
Special collection
Special collection
Collecting strategy for websites

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UK websites – territoriality explained
An online work is considered as “published in the UK” and therefore in scope for Legal Deposit, if it meets either of the following criteria:
(a) it is made available to the public from a website with a domain name which relates to the United Kingdom or to a place within the United Kingdom; or
(b) it is made available to the public by a person and any of that person’s activities relating to the creation or the publication of the work take place within the United Kingdom
The Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations, 2013

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Territoriality - implementation
All websites with a .uk domain name
Including embedded content (eg CSS, images) regardless where it is hosted
non .uk websites have to meet at least one criteria
UK Hosting: check external IP geo-location database and add in-scope URLs to the fetch-chain
UK postal address
Correspondence
Professional judgement

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UK Domain Crawl
2013 domain crawl stats
3.86 million seeds
1.9 billion URLs (web pages, docs, images)
~31TB
Duration: 70days
2014 domain crawl
90 million seeds (starting URLs)
Started on 19th June 2014
Collected 52TB of data (by 9th December (incl. 4.4GB of viruses & 3TB of homepage screenshots)
Nearly 2 million non .uk domains

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The “access” paradoxes
Completeness versus openness of web archives
Legal Deposit national collections have restricted access
Documents-centred versus data driven
Essentially a scale issue
Pre-selected or defined collections not relevant to all researchers; difficulty in finding relevant content in large scale web archive.
Arbitrary (national) boundaries often irrelevant to research question but most heritage institutions operation within certain geographical areas
…

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Web archive as historical document

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Collaboration with researchers
Building collections
Researchers’ involvement in scoping collections, selecting and describing websites
Creation of specific, (narrow) topical collections
Formulating research question
Brain-storm sessions, workshops, discussion, surveys etc.
Lack of awareness & baseline knowledge
Challenging: you don’t know what you don’t know
Co-development of access services
This is changing how we collect and store data

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JISC UK Web Domain dataset (1996-2013)
Collaboration between the Internet Archive (IA), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the British Library
Extracted copies of UK websites from the Internet Archives collection
1st tranche : 1996 – 2010, 30TB, 2.5 billion URLs
2nd tranche: 2010 – April 2013, 27.5TB, 1.5 billion URLs (estimated)
Research agreement between JISC and IA, upholding IA’s Terms of Use
Access via IA’s Wayback Machine
Allows replication / extraction of derivative or secondary datasets
BL hosts the dataset on behalf of JISC
Data used by research projects
Institute of Historical Research project: Analytical Access to the Domain Dark Archive (AADDA)
Oxford Internet Institute project: Big data for political science

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Completed work
Analytical Access to the Domain Dark Archive Project
Use cases & experimental UI
Demonstrating the Value of the UK Web Domain Dataset for Social Science Research
 Analysis of link graph
Paper accepted for WebSci’14: Mapping the UK Webspace: Fifteen Years of British Universities on the Web
MA thesis by Jules Mataly: The Three Truths of Margaret Thatcher: Creating and Analysing
Secondary datasets under open licence
Format profile, Geoindex, Host Link Graph

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Exploring Host Link Graph
Courtesy of Peter Webster, Rainer Simon and Jules Mataly

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Visualising links (to and from bl.uk)
Interactive version How it is done

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Visualising links (to and from bl.uk)
Interactive version How it is done

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Evolution of the UK web (2004 -2013)

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Memento service

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Big UK Domain Data for Arts and Humanities
Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as one of the 21 “Big Data” projects
Collaboration between the Institution of Historical Research, Oxford Internet Institute, British Library and Aarhus University
Develop theoretical and methodological framework for the study of web archives
Build on ADDAA: researchers and the BL co-produce access tools
 A major study of the history of UK web space from 1996 to 2013 + sub-projects covering a range of disciplines
 Also an online training course and peer-reviewed journal articles.

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Web archiving researcher bursaries

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Query building
Corpus formation and handling
Annotation and curation
In-corpus analysis
Whole-dataset analysis
Shine

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What’s in it for us?
Helps researchers understand the value of web archives and explore new ways of using these for scholarly research
Allows BL to obtain hands-on experience with indexing and processing large scale web archive datasets
(Prototypes) analytics and visualisations can be applied to our own Legal Deposit collection
Enables BL to participate in various UK, European and international projects
Helps curators understand characteristics of large scale digital corpora
Improve the way we collet and store web archive

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Web archives for reference AND for analytics
Base-line knowledge self-explanatory
Focus on national events for curated collections; provide means to assemble research corpora
Link to what we do not have
Offer a bag of tools to support scholarly use
The go-to state
Exploit open licences, changes to copyright law
Online access to selected websites, metadata and secondary datasets
The British Library Collection Development Policy for websites
Lobbying – review of Non-print Legal Deposit Regulations in 2018