The Archive of Tomorrow: health information and misinformation in the UK Web Archive

Joseph Marshall

Associate Director of Collections Management,

National Library of Scotland

@JosephDMarshall Associate Director of Collections Management

@JosephDMarshall

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National Library of Scotland

Leabharlann Nàiseanta na h-Alba

Web archives and the UK Web Archive

• Preserving online content for the future
• Legal Deposit legislation (2013)
• UKWA - collaborative enterprise with British Library
• 10 million websites (1 petabyte of data)
• Thematic collections as means of navigation
• Usage is very low – a few pioneers e.g. Gareth Millward

National Library of Scotland

Leabharlann Nàiseanta na h-Alba

Collecting Covid

• Pandemic Outbreaks collection begins in 2005 (Bird flu)
• Covid-19 sub-collection started in 2020 – over c.7,000 URLs
• Parallel collecting initiatives around the world (IIPC, Canada)
• An amazing collaborative activity – huge shout out to everyone involved

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Capturing the “official” story…

But what is “official” anyway?

…and the not official story…

What are the issues (1)

• How can future historians understand what happened in 2019-2022 without access to web archives?

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• Covid-19 is also a crisis of information and misinformation, which has played out online

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• Importance of capturing the full story – misinformation as well as official websites

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What are the issues (2)

• Lockdown highlights the restrictions on UKWA access and discovery
• Gaps in what we collect e.g. YouTube
• So easy for content to be lost or deliberately destroyed
• What about non-Covid health information?

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The project idea

• Focus on health information as a collecting priority
• Application to Wellcome Trust
• Partnership with NLS, Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh and supported by British Library
• 14-month pilot project

Project aims

• Curate a new collection of 10,000 archived URLs within the UKWA, with the theme of Health Information and Misinformation.
• Explore options for metadata, computational analysis, ethics and rights.
• Build a research network across disciplines, involving researchers in the process of building, evaluating and using collections.
• Produce a project report and advocate for change to make web archives more representative, inclusive and openly accessible.

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Project staff

• Distributed project team
• Web archivists x 3 (at Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford)
• Metadata Analyst
• Rights Officer
• Research Data Engineer
• Project Manager
• Also a UKRI Policy Intern (student)

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Advisory Board

• The British Library 
• The Digital Preservation Coalition 
• The National Archives 
• The National Records of Scotland 
• The Internet Archive 
• Practitioner representation
• Community representation

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Research network

• Digital humanists
• Public health researchers
• Social researchers
• Policy makers
• Journalists
• Internet historians 
• Cultural and literary scholars 
• Archive / information professionals
• Who else should we be talking to?

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Latest updates (May 2022)

• Funding of £230,958 in place (thanks Wellcome!)
• Project Steering Group and Project Team all in place
• Website live, social media activity
• Draft Collecting Framework, Risk Register, EQIA, Media Strategy
• First project workshop and Advisory Board held on 28 April
• Collecting has started
• Continuing high public profile of misinformation issues e.g. in relation to war in Ukraine

Collecting Framework (1) – structure of project collection

• Alternative health
• Blogs and social media
• Commercial / industrial health sector
• Government regulations
• Health and art / culture
• Health professions
• Long-term health
• Medical charities
• Medical research
• Politics and health

Collecting Framework (2) - sources

• Academic research institutions, principally further and higher education
• Medical institutions
• Charitable and private research institutions
• News reporting and commentary
• Academic journal and professional institutions
• Local, devolved and central government sites
• Blogs and social media

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Collecting Framework (3) - themes

• Vaccinations (official programmes, news coverage, anti-vax campaigns) 
• Health conspiracy theories (5G, microchips, scale/severity of pandemic) 
• Social measures for infection control (regulations for masks, hygiene, social distancing; stories about enforcement, resistance, lack of compliance) 
• Statistics and communication of data (mathematical modelling, popular understanding of risk and probability, the R number) 
• Dissemination of health science, research and education (academic outputs, charity reports, choice of language / image to convey complex health issues) 
• Change to living patterns and health impacts (working from home, loss of employment, reduction in travel pollution, loss of access to treatment for non-Covid conditions) 
• Alternative treatments and practice (ranging from homeopathy and dietary change to drinking bleach and magical practices) 
• Individual and community experiences (mental health during lockdown, solitary death / bereavement, connecting with neighbours, engagement with nature) 
• Equality impacts of public health issues (different outcomes for people with protected characteristics such as race or age; cultural responses to disease and social controls; inequities in access to health information due to lack of technological resources or learning disability) 
• Cultural responses to health emergency (socially-distanced musical performances, new fiction, blogs and vlogs, PPE fashion, events via Zoom, anti-regulation marches/demonstrations/campaigns, non-compliance campaigns) 
• Ethics and privacy (genetic profiling, management of personal data, place for personal testimony, individual autonomy vs public good) 
• Politics of health (NHS funding, divergence between UK and EU after Brexit, costs of social care, priorities for research funding) 

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Next steps

• Finalise branding and structure of project collection
• Identify priorities for other health topics to capture (e.g. alternative health, gender rights, genetics, allergies, animal welfare)
• Develop research network and user feedback
• Public event on misinformation
• Work with British Library on digital preservation (creating a back-up copy of the UKWA at the National Library of Scotland)
• Already thinking about what we do after this project…

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Questions

• How do we ethically capture and describe misinformation?
• How can AI improve creation of metadata and rights clearance?
• Can we analyse the web archive data at scale for digital scholarship?
• Project network – who else is interested?
• What other questions should we be asking?

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