Archive of Tomorrow

A health-focused web archiving research project

Funded by the Wellcome Trust

Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Scotland (project lead), Edinburgh University Library and the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, are collaborating to curate a target collection of 3,000 websites on ‘Health and Misinformation’.

The collection will be used as a case-study to explore access, ethical and rights issues connected with online health information.

Word map made during Archive of Tomorrow event

The collections will be available on the UK Web Archive, a partnership of the UK’s six legal deposit libraries which collects, preserves and provides access to UK-related web content.

Explore the material collected so far on the UK Web Archive.

Collecting and labelling

Project Web Archivist, Leontien Talboom, describes some of the decisions made when labelling the collection:

"We have stepped away from using labels as ‘information’ and ‘misinformation’. This choice was made quite early on in the project as the divide between information and misinformation does not seem to be as black and white as first thought."

A chemical sample being placed in test tube by medical professional wearing glasses and wearing blue gloves

To demonstrate where the archived material has been collected from, and ensure the content remains easy to navigate for users, the material has been categorised into the types and themes of content.

Scroll to view these categories and the range of content they contain.

Blogs and social media, Online blogs and social media content relating to health

Alice the Camera © University of Cambridge

Medical Professionals, A collection of online articles and commentary about health

Alice the Camera © University of Cambridge

Research webpages with a research focus or organisations who fund medical research

Alice the Camera © University of Cambridge

Government-published websites and pages regarding health

Photo by Joel Durkee on Unsplash

politics and health, writing and reflections on health from a political perspective

Photo by Online Marketing on Unsplash

News and commentary, a collection of online articles and commentary about health

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

Commercial/industrial health sector, websites and pages belonging to companies which focus on health

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Charities and non-profit organisations, charities, non-profit and registered societies' websites with a health focus

Photo by Jackson David on Unsplash

The project has also created focused collections, comprising content on specific health topics. This includes (but is not limited to):

Covid-19
Reproductive health
Mobile radiation
Nutrition
Cancer
Mental health

Scroll to view examples of content in the focused collections.

Engage with project

Read the project's Digital Archivist Leontien Talboom's blog post, exploring further how content has been collected for Archive of Tomorrow.

Share your thoughts on the project by tweeting @theUL using the hashtag #ArchiveofTomorrow

Tweets by theUL

Follow the work of the Digital Preservation team on their blog!

Project team

Caylin Smith

Co-Investigator

Leontien Talboom

Web Archivist

Published 6 March 2023
With thanks to:

^{Amelie Roper, Caylin Smith and Leontien Talboom for contribution}

^Photography
^{Laptop with hands typing, credit Alice the Camera / University of Cambridge}
^{Scientific sample process, credit University of Cambridge}

^{The text in this work is licensed under a}^{Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.}

Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Scotland (project lead), Edinburgh University Library and the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, are collaborating to curate a target collection of 3,000 websites on ‘Health and Misinformation’.

Collecting and labelling

"We have stepped away from using labels as ‘information’ and ‘misinformation’. This choice was made quite early on in the project as the divide between information and misinformation does not seem to be as black and white as first thought."

Image captions

Engage with project

Project team

Caylin Smith

Leontien Talboom