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Trinity College Library Dublin hosted a public lecture entitled Meeting the Challenges of Preserving the UK Web on Wednesday, 6th of May at 1:15pm in the Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.
The talk was delivered by Helen Hockx-Yu, Head of Web Archiving, British Library.
The British Library has taken on the challenge of collecting and providing continued access to UK’s digital heritage. An important element of this is the World Wide Web, fast evolving since its advent in 1980, and fundamentally changing the way we live, work and communicate. The British Library started a programme of work in 2003, to build from scratch the capacity to eventually preserve the entire UK web domain. The UK Legal Deposit Libraries, including Trinity College Library Dublin, are now on the front line of the most ambitious expansion of heritage responsibilities in more than 300 years. This is required and enabled by the UK Non-Print Legal Deposit regulations which came into force in April 2013, charging us with capturing, among a wide range of digital publications, the content of every site carrying the .uk suffix (and more), preserving the material and making it accessible in the Legal Deposit Libraries’ reading rooms.
This talk provided an overview of the key curatorial, legal and technical challenges related to archiving the UK web, and the approaches the British Library has taken to meet these challenges. It covered interaction and engagement with researchers, using the Big UK Domain Data for Arts and Humanities (http://buddah.projects.history.ac.uk/) as an example, and summarised the learning, including some research outputs and how scholarly interaction changed the way the British Library collects websites, and stores and makes available web archives.
Helen Hockx-Yu is Head of Web Archiving at the British Library (BL). She has led the BL’s web archiving activities since 2008, building the Library’s capability for archiving the UK web at scale and implementing legal deposit of over 4 million UK websites since April 2013. She has published and spoken extensively about web archiving, addressing national and international audiences at various academic and professional conferences. Previously, Helen was Project Manager of the Planets project, a four-year project co-funded by the European Union under the Sixth Framework Programme to address core digital preservation challenges. Before joining the British Library, she worked as a Programme Manager at the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, overseeing JISC’s research and development activities in the area of digital preservation.
Event Details:
Date: Wednesday, 06 May 2015
Time: 13.15 (approximately 1 hour)
Venue: Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Neill Lecture Theatre.