Archive of Tomorrow: Health Information and Misinformation in the UK Web Archive

1. Archive of Tomorrow:
Health Information and Misinformation in the UK Web
Archive

2. • Wellcome Trust funding
• Collaboration between University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford,
and University of Cambridge, led by National Library of Scotland with
support from UK Web Archive Team @ British Library
• 3 web archivists, a metadata analyst, a rights officer and a
research software engineer
• External aim: to create a collection of 10,000 targets relating to
health in the UK Web Archive
• Internal aims: to explore how to ethically collect from the web;
how to republish responsibly; and what is needed to increase
of web archives in research
Project overview

3. • 6 Legal Deposit Libraries: Edinburgh, Cardiff, Oxford, Cambridge, London,
Dublin
• The Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013
• Covers content ‘published’ on a UK domain (.uk, .scot, .cymru, .wales) or
by a UK-based creator
• does not cover ‘(a) work consisting only of—
(i) a sound recording or film or both, or
(ii) such material and other material which is merely incidental to it;
(b) work which contains personal data and which is only made
available to a restricted group of persons; or
(c) work published before these Regulations were made’
https://www.webarchive.org.uk/
UK Web Archive

4. Defining ‘health information’

5. ‘Official’ sources…
Charities & Third
Sector Organisations
Private providers
National Health
Services
Clinical Commissioning
Groups

6. ….‘unofficial’ sources?
Social media
Alternative or
complementary medicine
News and commentary
Commercial/retail sites

7. Describing and indexing
• MeSH vocabulary – concerns about some of the language?
• Want it to be interoperable with other collections/familiar to
researchers but not at the expense of excluding non-specialists
– is specialist medical language a barrier?
• Subject-specific indexing – don’t necessarily have established
controlled vocabularies for these, so need to be developed
• Labelling – how to balance responsibility to creators with
responsibility to users?

8. Ethical collecting?
• Awareness of web archiving
increasing (‘receipts culture’) =
informed consent?
• Disclosure of personal medical
circumstances – what are the
ethics of preserving that in
perpetuity?
• Third-party disclosure?
• Legislation largely concerned with
preserving copyright, not privacy

9. Responsible republishing: evolving
information
Archived copies of https://www.nhsinform.scot/coronavirus
7 March 2020
15 March
2020
12 April
2020

10. Responsible republishing: dissent and debate

11. Facilitating research: current limitations

12. Facilitating research: possible solutions

13. Facilitating research: possible solutions

14. Facilitating research: possible solutions

15. https://www.webarchive.org.uk/act/subjects/4028
Alice Austin
University of Edinburgh
alice.austin@ed.ac.uk
@adoyleaustin_
Leontien Talboom
University of Cambridge
lkt39@cam.ac.uk
@makethecatwise