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Keeping it under lock and keywords

Exploring new ways to open up the web archives with notebooks

Bibliographic Data

ID12628816
AuthorsLeontien Talboom (0000-0001-7408-5471, National Archives, corresponding author), Mark Bell (0000-0003-0154-4651, National Archives)
Year2022
Volume22
Issue3
Pages393-415
Publication date2022-07-04
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueArchival Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1389-0166 • E-ISSN: 1573-7500
PublisherSpringer Nature (PUBLISHER • SG)
DOI10.1007/s10502-022-09391-6
PMID35814870
OpenAlexW4283798484
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited17

The UK Government Web Archive (UKGWA) has been archiving government websites since 1996 and now holds regular snapshots of over 5000 sites. Currently, this material can be accessed through browsing or a simple keyword search interface on their website and has also been catalogued in The National Archives' online catalogue, Discovery. However, the scale of the UKGWA exposes the limits of the current search interface, and there is no facility to understand the archive in aggregate. This article seeks to go beyond the simple keyword search by exploring the data sources available, from APIs to web crawling, for computational analysis of the UKGWA. The article is accompanied by two Python Notebooks which present examples of analysis using each data source. Notebooks lower the technical barriers for the reader to explore and interpret the UKGWA as data, while surfacing the challenges around making web material computationally accessible

Archaeology · Cultural heritage · Data science · Lock (firearm · Open source · Programming language · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Data Quality and Management · History · Research Data Management Practices · Web Data Mining and Analysis

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Citations per year1
Citation span2025 - 2025 (1)
Highly citedNo

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