The IHR Digital team are delighted to announce an innovative new venture in partnership with the British Library. A new advisory panel of historians has been convened to work with the BL’s web archiving team in developing policy for identifying web content most in need of preservation. The group is interested both in contemporary representations of the distant past online, but also in those areas of web estate which will in themselves be the primary sources for later historians of the early twenty-first century. The panel is drawn from all over the country, and from a wide variety of specialisms.
I myself am also involved in another web archiving venture with the British Library: the ‘Researchers and the UK web archive’ project. A group of scholars from several disciplines will over the next year conduct individual investigations into the potential of the UK Web Archive for new research. In some cases this will involve the guest curation of new collections within UKWA. A genuinely innovative project, it promises to help shape the future direction of web archiving policy in the UK. The title of my own section is ‘The politics of religion in Britain after 9/11’