Chapter 2: Web Archives and the Problem of Access: Prototyping a Researcher Dashboard for the UK Government Web Archive

TitleChapter 2: Web Archives and the Problem of Access: Prototyping a Researcher Dashboard for the UK Government Web Archive
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of PublicationSubmitted
AuthorsBell, Mark, and Jane Winters
Pagination22
AbstractThere is a burgeoning secondary literature concerning the use of the archived web as a primary source for Humanities research, but it remains centrally concerned with how to work around problems of scale, complexity and access. The manifold barriers encountered include the inability to download and take away data; the opacity of web harvesting processes; the (unknown) scale of content duplication; and the unsuitability of keyword searching as a primary means of exploration. An important record of the recent past remains tantalizingly out of reach for the majority of historians, political scientists, literary scholars and others.
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