UK Web Archive Annual Report April 2020 - March 2021

Abstract

• The UK Web Archive is a shared resource and collaborative activity of the six UK legal deposit libraries. Since April 2013 it has been a cornerstone of our collecting under legal deposit. This report covers an exceptional year, which has highlighted the strengths, resilience and adaptability of staff across the legal deposit libraries in responding to collection challenges and maintaining services to users. In this year, we have curated a detailed collection to document the UK’s experience during the pandemic, and worked with our international partners to document the global impact of coronavirus. We adapted our annual domain crawl of all UK websites so that it could use cloud services and run during a period of remote working and unprecedented demand on network bandwidth. In our 15th anniversary year, we were also honoured to receive the ‘Safeguarding the Digital Legacy’ Digital Preservation Award. The Award reflected the urgency and importance of both web archiving and the research use of the archived web, and is also recognition of the partners that we have worked with to develop the UK Web Archive. This report highlights the activities of the UK Web Archive over the last year (April 2020 - March 2021). The report looks at notable areas of interest such as collection development, ongoing partnerships, projects and awards. It also shows headline statistics in many aspects of the web archive service.