Web Archiving in the UK: Current Developments and Reflections for the Future

This work presents a brief overview on the history of Web archiving projects in some English speaking countries, paying particular attention to the development and main problems faced by the UK Web Archive Consortium (UKWAC) and UK Web Archive partnership in Britain. It highlights, particularly, the changeable nature of Web pages through constant content removal and/or alteration and the evolving technological innovations brought recently by Web 2.0 applications, discussing how these factors have an impact on Web archiving projects. It also examines different collecting approaches, harvesting software limitations and how the current copyright and deposit regulations in the UK covering digital contents are failing to support Web archive projects in the country. From the perspective of users’ access, this dissertation offers an analysis of UK Web archive interfaces identifying their main drawbacks and suggesting how these could be further improved in order to better respond to users’ information needs and access to archived Web content