Text Improvement - What is the UK Web Archive

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What we do The UK Web Archive (UKWA) collects millions of websites each year, preserving them for future generations. The UKWA is a partnership of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries.

Use this site to discover old or obsolete versions of UK websites, search the text of the websites and browse websites curated on different topics and themes.

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[pop-up] UK Legal Deposit Libraries By law, all UK print and digital publications (including websites) must be deposited with the British Library and by request to the other five Legal Deposit Libraries. They are - the National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Libraries and Trinity College, Dublin.

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Topics and Themes Explore over 100 collections of websites brought together by librarians, curators and other experts in response to a wide range of events and diverse topics and themes.

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Tips/Notes for using the UK Web Archive

• Use Boolean search terms - AND, NOT, OR etc. e.g. apple NOT fruit.
• Use quote marks when looking for a specific phrase e.g. “London Olympics”.
• Note that dates refer to when items were collected and not when they were made available on the Internet.
• The UKWA contains very little social media, and no Facebook due to technical difficulties with it's collection.
• This is a collection of UK websites. The Archive contains many more .uk websites rather than other top level domains such as .com
• About 15,000 websites, collected from 2004 to the present, are publicly available online as we have the website owner's consent to make them available in this way.
• The majority of the millions of websites in the UKWA, collected from 2013 onwards have been acquired under the Non-Print Legal Deposit Act, 2003. Without an additional licence from the website owner, these websites can only be viewed in the reading rooms of Legal Deposit Libraries.

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About Us

The UK Web Archive aims to collect all UK websites at least once per year.

Websites constitute a significant witness to our times. However, it is typical for them to be created quickly, changed regularly and sometimes to disappear altogether often without notice. Despite this lack of permanence, the UK Web Archive attempts to collect, preserve and give access to this material for current and future researchers of all kinds, from scholars and professionals to family historians and those with a general interest.

We perform an automated collection of UK websites (otherwise known as a ‘crawl’) at least once a year in order to capture as many websites as we can. This results in a collection of many millions of websites and billions of individual "assets" (html pages, images, pdf’s, video’s etc.).

We also collect a number of important websites more frequently (up to daily). These are often, though not always, news websites.

In addition, our curators and other experts, regularly focus on collecting websites on specific events, subjects or areas of interest and group them in ‘Topics and Themes’.

Only material publicly available on the open Web is collected. We do not collect private information such as emails or content behind a login. Only a very limited amount of social media is archived due to technical difficulties.

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Save a UK website

The UK Web Archive endeavours to collect and preserve as many UK websites as possible in order to document our online national heritage. We do this through automated “web crawls” which retrieve websites on UK geographical top level domain names, such as .uk, .cymru and .scot.

Library staff and other experts also select individual websites to preserve. These are often related to particular topics, themes or events.

This is a huge task and naturally there are a vast amount of websites that we miss simply because we don’t know about them.

We would be very pleased to hear of websites that you think we should be archiving. Perhaps you own or edit a UK website that we are not already collecting? We archive website of all kinds from the official output of UK organisations to more personal or quirky websites. Please do submit the details on the short form below.

Thank-you from the UK Web Archiving Team.

We archive websites:

That are on a .uk or other UK geographic top-level domain such as .scot or .cymru That are published in the UK.

We do not archive:

Online Sound or Video platforms, in which audio-visual material is the predominant content. Private Intranets and Emails.

Personal data in social networking sites or websites only available to restricted groups.

[TEXT FOR THE WEBSITE FORM]

Save a UK website Fields marked with * are mandatory

Personal details you provide on this form are protected by UK Data Protection Law. Please view our Privacy Statement.

• Title of website Please enter the title of website
• URL of the website Please enter URL of website Your name Please enter your name
• Your email address [] Please enter your email address Any other information Use this space to tell us for example, if you own this website, or if it is about to go offline [] we need your email address if you require a response from us. It would also be helpful if you are the owner of the nominated website and would like us to make archival copies of the website available through the UK Web Archive.

Submit

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Contact

Contact Us Please see our Frequently Asked Questions where you will find information about the UK Web Archive and about web archiving in general.

If you still have questions or we can help further please contact us on the form below.

Contact form

Fields marked with * are mandatory

Personal details you provide on this form are not shared with third parties. The use of personal details is controlled by the Data Protection Act 2018. Please view our Privacy Statement.

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https://trello.com/c/oZmYylwS/1-revise-text-on-what-the-uk-web-archive-is-clarify-what-is-i-and-not-in-the-collection-just-uk-what-is-a-legal-deposit-library-re

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See also #90