You might have noticed some changes to the web archives section of the GLAM Workbench.

I’m very excited to announce that the British Library is now sponsoring the web archives section! Many thanks to the British Library and the UK Web Archive for their support – it really makes a difference.

The web archives section was developed in 2020 with the support of the International Internet Preservation Consortium’s Discretionary Funding Programme, in collaboration with the British Library, the National Library of Australia, and the National Library of New Zealand. It’s intended to help historians, and other researchers, understand what sort of data is available through web archives, how to get it, and what you can do with it. It provides a series of tools and examples that document existing APIs, and explore questions such as how web pages change over time. The notebooks focus on four particular web archives: the UK Web Archive, the Australian Web Archive (National Library of Australia ), the New Zealand Web Archive (National Library of New Zealand), and the Internet Archive. However, the tools and approaches could be easily extended to other web archives (and soon will be!). I introduced the web archives section of the GLAM Workbench in this seminar for the IIPC in August 2020:

According to the Binder launch stats, the web archives section is the most heavily used part of the GLAM Workbench. In December 2020, it won the British Library Labs Research Award. Last year I updated the repository, automating the build of Docker images, and adding integrations with Zenodo, Reclaim Cloud, and Australia’s Nectar research cloud. I’m also thinking about some new notebooks – watch this space!

The GLAM Workbench receives no direct funding from government or research agencies, and so the support of sponsors like the British Library and all my other GitHub sponsors is really important. Thank you! If you think this work is valuable, have a look at the Get involved! page to see how you can contribute. And if your organisation would like to sponsor a section of the GLAM Workbench, let me know!