Capturing commemoration: the 1916 Easter Rising web archive project

ABSTRACT

This paper outlines a collaborative project between three UK Legal Deposit Libraries, the Library of Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin, the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and the British Library, to create a web archive collection of material relating to the one hundredth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. From a curatorial perspective, it discusses the potential of themed web archive collections for researching commemorative events, outlines the evolving understanding of archival material, reviews the project, and explores the technical, legal, and methodological problems and opportunities that emerged as the project progressed. It highlights the challenges that arose from collaborating across multiple jurisdictions with differing arrangements surrounding non-print legal deposit, and the impact of institutional and legislative frameworks on collection building.

KEYWORDS:

• Web archives
• web archive curation
• online commemoration
• 1916 Easter Rising
• UK Legal Deposit Libraries

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Jane Winters, and the anonymous peer reviewers of this journal, for helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The six UK Legal Deposit Libraries are as follows: the British Library, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, Bodleian Library (University of Oxford), Cambridge University Library, and The Library of Trinity College Dublin (University of Dublin).

2. Full documentation, including a comprehensive W3ACT user guide, is available at https://github.com/ukwa/w3act/.

3. Applying the UK legal deposit definition, a website is considered to be in the UK domain when its URL has the .uk suffix (or any other top level domain attributed to the UK; e.g. .cymru), is hosted in the UK, OR a substantial part of the website creation and publishing process takes part in the UK.

4. The permission process for websites not covered by UK legal deposit legislation technically includes two separate permissions or licences: the permission to capture and archive a copy of the website, and the licence, given by the website owner as the copyright holder, to make the archived version publicly available. UK websites, under UK legal deposit law, can be captured and archived without the website owner's permission. However, access to these archived web sites is then subject to legal deposit regulations, which, for example, only allow access onsite at a UK Legal Deposit Library, and via a dedicated interface. If a website archived under legal deposit is to be made publicly available, a licence agreement from the website owner has to be signed, in the same way as licence to publish and archive a copy has to be acquired for non-UK websites (For the different permission and access routes for UK and non-UK websites see Figure 2.). This permissions-based framework is in line with the UK copyright and legal deposit legislative environment, which currently does not allow for a notice-and-takedown approach in web archiving.

5. Of the 112 websites contributed by the Library of Trinity College Dublin: Permission cleared: 57, Permission not received: 55 (of which no response to permission request: 52, permission denied: 3). The main reason for denying permission to archive was that website owners were unsure whether they could act as the copyright owner of all content included on their website, as it is required by the terms of the licensing agreement to make the archived version of a website publicly available.

6. Comprising 27% of the Easter Rising collection – 86 items for which licence has been cleared, either through the permission process for non-UK websites, or via existing licences for UK websites, e.g. government websites.

7. Two identical versions were available under http://www.webarchive.org.uk/easter_rising/tcd.html and http://www.webarchive.org.uk/easter_rising/bodleian.html. An archived copy can be found in the UK Web Archive.

8. Some of the technical reasons included issues such as no Ethernet socket being available close enough to the display cases, or a standard computer terminal not complying with historic venue guidelines in a heritage listed seventeenth century building. Legal reasons included IT security concerns about providing internet access from public areas without individual user login/identification.

9. Ca. 400 postcards were picked up by exhibition visitors, around 300 were handed out at related events, and further 250 were distributed via the Irish Embassy in London.

10. The National Library of Ireland project “Remembering 1916, Recording 2016” archived 455 websites which are all publicly available via the NLI web archive at http://www.nli.ie/en/web_archive.aspx. The Internet Archive, which operates a notice-and-takedown policy rather than obtaining formal permission to archive, will have captured a large amount of web content relating to the Easter Rising centenary in the course of its extensive and largely automated crawls. However, the Internet Archive does not present this as a cohesive collection, and a Wayback Machine search, as of 19 February 2018, returns only 51 results for a keyword search “Easter Rising” – of which less than half (24) are at some degree relevant to the 1916 event in Irish history. An advanced search for ‘Easter Rising’ across the Internet Archive's resources yields 198 results, of which 194 are individual texts (such as e-books), sound files or images.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Svenja Kunze

Svenja Kunze has a M.A. in Modern History, Political Science and Media and Communication Studies from the University of Münster, Germany, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Archives and Records Management from the University of Liverpool. She is a Project Archivist at the Bodleian Library Archives and Modern Manuscripts department, where from 2013 to 2016 she worked on Legal Deposit UK Web Archive collections, including a curatorial role in Bodleian Libraries' Easter Rising project.

Brendan Power

Brendan Power holds a BA from Dublin City University and an MPhil and PhD in History from Trinity College, the University of Dublin. A former Irish Research Council Scholar, his major research centres on the history of uniformed organisations for adolescent boys in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Library of Trinity College Dublin, he acted as the Web Archive Project Officer on the 1916 Easter Rising Web Archive.