Reviewing football history through the UK Web Archive

ABSTRACT

The UK Web Archive aims to archive, preserve and give access to the UK webspace. This aim is achieved through an annual domain crawl, in addition to frequent crawls of selected websites and specially curated collections. These collections reflect important aspects of British culture and events that shape society. Sport and in particular football, make up a large section of the UK webspace. For this reason, the UK Web Archive started a curated collection on these subjects in autumn 2017. This article acts as a guide to the collections, using football as an example of the type of research that can be done, rather than a critical analysis of contemporary collection policies or the examples highlighted. It is hoped that this article will increase the use of the UK Web Archive and lead to a further review of how the sports studies field adapts as well as engages with digital resources.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my British Library colleagues who helped me with writing this article and with the illustrations. Special thanks must go to Ian Cooke, Nicola Bingham, Olga Holownia, Carlos Rarugal, Andrew Jackson and Gil Hoggarth. I would also like to thank the UK Legal Deposit Library partners who have helped to build the sports related collections within the UK Web Archive, especially Trevor Thompson from the National Library of Scotland, who was the Co-Lead Curator for the Sports: Football and the Sports Collection. In addition, I would like to thank Peter Webster for answering my questions and Gary James for his support in bringing this article to print.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest is reported by the authors.

Notes

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5. Winters, ‘Coda: Web Archives for Humanities Research’.

6. Winters, ‘Breaking into the mainstream’.

7. Brügger, The Archived Web.

8. McCarthy, Web archiving in the heritage and archive sectors.

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10. Department for Culture, Media and Sport in the United Kingdom, The Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013, 2013 No. 777.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/777/contents/made (accessed November 7, 2018).

11. Smith and Cooke, ‘Emerging Formats’.

12. UK Web Archive, Topics and themes. https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection (accessed October 27, 2018).

13. Smith and Cooke. ‘Emerging Formats’.

14. JISC and the Internet Archive (2013). JISC UK Web Domain Dataset (1996–2013). The British Library. https://doi.org/10.5259/ukwa.ds.2/1.

15. UK Web Archive (2013). Shine. https://www.webarchive.org.uk/shine (accessed October 23, 2018).

16. Image courtesy of Andrew N. Jackson, Web Archiving Technical Lead, The British Library.

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18. Klein and Van de Sompel, ‘Using the Memento framework to assess content drift in scholarly communication’.

19. Booth, ‘Sites of Truth or Metaphors of Power?’.

20. Helena Byrne, ‘Sports Collections in the UK Web Archive’, The UK Web Archive Blog. https://blogs.bl.uk/webarchive/2018/09/sports-collections-in-the-uk-web-archive.html (accessed November 4, 2018).

21. Rackley, ‘Archiving the Games’.

22. Johnes, ‘What’s the Point of Sports History?’; Reilly, ‘The Development of Sport in Museums’; James, ‘Sport History Relevance and How We Need to Engage’.

23. UK Web Archive, ‘W3ACT User Guide’. https://github.com/ukwa/w3act/wiki/W3ACT-User-Guide (accessed November 14, 2018).

24. JISC and the Internet Archive (2013). JISC UK Web Domain Dataset (1996–2013). The British Library. https://doi.org/10.5259/ukwa.ds.2/1.

25. Andrew N. Jackson, JISC UK Web Domain Dataset (1996–2010) Host Link Graph. The British Library, 2013. https://doi.org/10.5259/ukwa.ds.2/host.linkage/1.

26. Ibid.

27. What Uni? Sports Management Degrees. https://www.whatuni.com/degree-courses/search?subject=sports-management (accessed October 21, 2018).

28. Webster, ‘Reading British creationism in the web archive’.

29. Webster, ‘Understanding the limitations of the ccTLD as a proxy for the national web’.

30. UK Web Archive (2013). Shine. https://www.webarchive.org.uk/shine/(accessed October 23, 2018).

31. Ibid.

32. Andrew N. Jackson,‘Towards a Macroscope for UK Web History’, The UK Web Archive Blog. https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/webarchive/2015/06/towards-a-macroscope-for-uk-web-history.html (accessed November 4, 2018).

33. Andrew N. Jackson, ‘Introducing SHINE 2.0 – A Historical Search Engine’, The UK Web Archive Blog. https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/webarchive/2016/02/updating-our-historical-search-service.html (accessed November 4, 2018).

34. UK Web Archive (2013), ‘A sample of librarian job titles’. Shine Trends. https://www.webarchive.org.uk/shine/graph?query = %22Internet+Librarian%22%2 C+%22Health+Librarian%22%2 C+%22Reference+Librarian%22%2 C+%22Law+Librarian%22%2 C+%22Music+Librarian%22%2 C+%22Electronic+Resource+Librarian%22%2 C+%22Digital+Librarian%22&year_start = 1996&year_end = 2013&action = update (accessed October 2, 2018).

35. UK Web Archive (2013), ‘축구’. Shine Search. https://www.webarchive.org.uk/shine/search?query = %EC%B6%95%EA%B5%AC&tab = results&action = search (accessed November 4, 2018).

36. UK Web Archive (2013). Shine. https://www.webarchive.org.uk/shine/search/tips (accessed October 23, 2018).

37. Ed Vulliamy, ‘Manchester divided: United and City fans on football’s power shift’, The Guardian, May 12, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/may/12/manchester-united-city-premier-league (accessed November 3, 2018).

38. UK Web Archive (2013). Shine: Search ‘Manchester City FC’. https://www.webarchive.org.uk/shine/search?query = %22Manchester+City+FC%22&tab = results&action = search (accessed November 22, 2018); UK Web Archive (2013). Shine: Search ‘Manchester United FC’. https://www.webarchive.org.uk/shine/search?query = %22Manchester+United+FC%22&tab = results&action = search (accessed November 22, 2018).

39. UK Web Archive (2013). Shine: Search ‘Manchester City FC’ AND ‘Football’. https://www.webarchive.org.uk/shine/search?query = %22Manchester+City%22+ AND+%22Football%22&tab = results&action = search (accessed November 22, 2018); UK Web Archive (2013). Shine: Search ‘Manchester United FC’ AND ‘Football’. https://www.webarchive.org.uk/shine/search?query = %22Manchester+United%22+ AND+%22Football%22&tab = results&action = search (accessed November 22, 2018).

40. Andrew N, Jackson, ‘Introducing SHINE 2.0 – A Historical Search Engine’, The UK Web Archive Blog. https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/webarchive/2016/02/updating-our-historical-search-service.html (accessed October 23, 2018).

41. Winters. ‘Coda’.

42. UK Web Archive (2013). Shine: Trends https://www.webarchive.org.uk/shine/graph?query = %22Women%27 s+ Football%22%2 C+%22Ladies+Football%22%2 C+%22Girls+Football%22%2 C+%22Boys+Football%22%2 C+%22Men%27 s+ Football%22&year_start = 1996&year_end = 2013&action = update (accessed October 23, 2018).

43. Jayne Caudwell, ‘Why this football tournament should be called the men’s World Cup’, The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/why-this-football-tournament-should-be-called-the-mens-world-cup-98348 (accessed November 3, 2018).

44. BBC News, ‘Women versus ladies football: Does the name matter?’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37552890 (accessed November 3, 2018).

45. UK Web Archive (2013). Shine Trends. https://www.webarchive.org.uk/shine/graph?query = %22Women%27 s+ Football%22%2 C+%22Ladies+Football%22%2 C+%22Girls+Football%22%2 C+%22Boys+Football%22%2 C+%22Men%27 s+ Football%22&year_start = 1996&year_end = 2013&action = update (accessed November 3, 2018).

46. Wikipedia, ‘Domain Name’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name (accessed November 14, 2018).

47. Peter Webster, ‘What’s in a (top-level) domain name?’, Web archives for historians blog. https://webarchivehistorians.org/the-web-archive-bibliography/(accessed November 4, 2018).

48. There are multiple archive records for the same domain as subsections from one domain can be added to several curated collections. Thus, further analysis is needed to deduplicate these records to confirm the true percentage of manually curated domains.

49. Webster, ‘What’s in a (top-level) domain name?

50. The hosting location of these websites was found through the My IP Address website. https://myip.ms/info/whois/104.20.56.51/k/4075989947/website/www.mancity.com https://myip.ms/info/whois/54.192.48.107/k/2559463810/website/www.liverpoolfc.com https://myip.ms/info/whois/151.101.22.133/k/3628170513/website/www.chelseafc.com https://myip.ms/info/whois/52.178.114.226/k/191909725/website/www.tottenhamhotspur.com https://myip.ms/info/whois/69.164.18.73/k/1788788118/website/www.arsenal.com (accessed October 23, 2018).

51. International Internet Preservation Consortium. IIPC members. http://netpreserve.org/about-us/members/(accessed October 23 2018).

52. Time Travel. About the Time Travel service. http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/about/(accessed October 23, 2018).

53. Internet Archive, ‘Wayback Machine’. https://archive.org/web/(accessed October 23, 2018).

54. Fa-premier.com. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.fa-premier.com (accessed October 23, 2018).

55. Web Science and Digital Libraries – Department of Computer Science, ‘Carbon Dating The Web’ Old Dominion University, USA. http://carbondate.cs.odu.edu/(accessed November 4, 2018).

56. Sports Zine UK. Liverpool FC. http://web.archive.org/web/19970428091719/http://www.sportszineuk.co.uk:80/football/liverpoo.htm.

57. BBC News. Man Utd ‘for sale’ on internet. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/652062.stm (accessed October 23, 2018).

58. Liverpool Fashion Club. http://web.archive.org/web/20001017102643/https://www.liverpoolfc.com (accessed October 23, 2018).

59. Liverpoolfc.co.uk https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.liverpoolfc.co.uk (accessed October 23, 2018).

60. liverpoolfc-newkit.co.uk https://web.archive.org/web/20000615000000*/http://www.liverpoolfc-newkit.co.uk (accessed October 23, 2018).

61. Wikipedia, ‘Liverpool F.C.: Ownership and finances’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_F.C.#Ownership_and_finances (accessed November 3, 2018).