When we launched our report on museum closure last December, the British Library approached us to ask if we would be interested in using our research as the basis for a website archive.
It seemed a very appropriate project to get involved in. Websites have often proved to be invaluable sources for information about museums – not only for those that are open, of course, but also for those that have closed. Online resources have provided data for all three projects that the Mapping Museums Lab has undertaken, but our most recent project on museum closure highlighted once again a problem that’s well known by those that undertake research online.
For our first project, Mapping Museums, we recorded the sources of information for each museum, which frequently included websites. When we checked some of those again for our latest project six years later, many of those sites had gone offline. This phenomenon, known as ‘link rot’, is all too common and services have been developed to deal with the issue by archiving as much of the internet as possible. Probably the best known of these is the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. Wayback has proved invaluable for tracking down extinct websites, or single pages removed from a site that’s still online.
The UK Web Archive fulfils a similar purpose for UK websites. It’s a partnership of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries – including the British Library – and aims to collect as much as possible of the UK’s web space. The archive began on a selective basis in 2005 and scaled up from 2013 onwards. The collection contains millions of websites and new ones are being added all the time. Due to the cyber-attack in November 2023, the archive is currently unavailable but the work of collecting websites continues.
With so many websites in existence, how to choose what to archive? The British Library’s archivists rely partly on nominations from the public to make their choices and this is where Mapping Museums comes in. We are contributing a thematic collection of websites that have provided information about museum closure. Some of these belonged to the museums themselves, but more commonly the site fulfils a different purpose.
We’ve used a wide variety of sources. News websites are probably the most common, and those of museums and related bodies like the Museums Association, but we also consulted auction houses, estate agents, listed building records, review websites (e.g. Tripadvisor), Government and local authorities, local history groups and specialist societies, hospitals, universities, heritage organisations such as the National Trust, personal websites, discussion forums, the Historic Ships Register, heritage railways, and more besides.
Work is underway on nominating a long list of websites like these from our previous research. Revisiting them just a few years later, we’re already finding that some have gone offline entirely or individual pages have been removed. Fortunately some sites are already in the UK Web Archive, but this is not true for all of them. As link rot continues, that makes this mini archiving project all the more relevant. We’re very happy to be supporting the long-term preservation of online resources that we’ve often found invaluable when researching the histories of hundreds of museums in the UK.
Mark Liebenrood