UK Company Websites: Scoping Document

Abstract

• This document aims to establish the scope of a website collection initiated as part of the UK Legal Deposit Libraries Non-Print Legal Deposit collection building activity. The collection has been given the working title “UK Company Websites”. It aims to establish a rationale for collecting websites of UK companies of all sizes and sectors. Such a scope is far-ranging and also may crossover with other collections, but I think it is worth setting out a way of categorisation using special collections subcategories. Whilst the task is probably very open ended, the following hopes to indicate things to look for in company websites that are especially worthy of saving as well as the types of companies to concentrate on. It also hopes to formalise a way of describing companies in the UKWA archiving tool. Other collections will have ‘company websites’ in them – in effect charities, organisations, media sites and others are often companies as well as sites. This scoping document hopes to deal with companies that don’t fall under other aspects of the collections. Usually these will be manufacturing, distribution, retailing, professional and service companies. The collection will concentrate on commercial entities that don’t have a role in any other collection. According to the UK Parliament there were 5.9 million businesses in the UK in 2019. A large proportion of these will have websites of some description, though increasing some businesses exist solely on social media. We cannot hope to collect all of these within the special collection, but this scoping document will at least present a road map to do our best in this. The websites in question can vary from one page of a local restaurant to the multipage site of a large retailer or multinational manufacturer. Note: any examples given in this document are from company websites currently on the UKWA.