Collecting the Scottish Web at NLS – a report of a census
Name
Collecting_the_Scottish_Web_at_NLS_-_a_report_of_a_census_2024_10_30.pdf
Description
visibility:open
Size
270.83 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (CRC64NVME)
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Resource type
Report
Creator (person)
Thomson, Trevor
Date published
October 2024
Abstract
The UK Web Archive (UKWA) has existed since 2004.1 Established by the British Library and the other United Kingdom Legal Deposit Libraries it was used initially to target and collect websites for organisations who had granted permission for their material to be collected. With the extension of the UK Legal Deposit privilege in 2013 an annual crawl of the UK web domain was initiated by the British Library where a copy of most UK websites is made without the need to seek permission.
The vast quantity of material collected in the UK Web Archive exists because of this automated crawl. However, targeting sites using the UKWA curation module, where intervention is made by a curator to specify material to be collected, occurs for a number of different reasons:
1. To add a website or a constituent of a site to a collection attached to a topic, event or other collection. A good example is the COVID-19 outbreak.
2. To give description to a website and attach subject or collection information.
3. To ensure that a website for a UK based organisation or individual overlooked by the annual automated crawl is copied.
4. A combination of all of the above.
The annual crawl is mainly based on location of internet service provider attributed to websites and the presence of.uk, .scot suffixes (among others). For UK sites it is not always certain that these automatically apply, and in these circumstances automated collection is missed.
The National Library of Scotland has added considerably to the UK Web Archive by identifying websites relating to Scotland that would have in all likelihood missed being collected by the annual domain crawl, as well as giving more nuance to sites that are included in that crawl.
Publisher
National Library of Scotland
Place of publication
Edinburgh
Official URL
Rights statement
In Copyright