About
Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Archive of Tomorrow is a project to explore and preserve online information and misinformation relating to health, including the Covid-19 pandemic, in the UK Web Archive.
The project is led by National Library of Scotland, with Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian Libraries, and Edinburgh Universtiy Library as partners, and with the UK Web Archive team at the British Library in a supporting role.
At CUL, Caylin Smith (Co-Investigator) and Leontien Talboom (Web Archivist) are the project's contacts.
With funding provided by Cambridge Digital Humanities, the project also includes two Methods Fellows carrying out research using the Talking About Health collection.
The project ran for 18 months, beginning in February 2022 and concluding in April 2023.
The final report for the project can be downloaded from the British Library's research repository.
Background
The Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to a global crisis of information vs misinformation that has played out mostly online.
Government and medical websites have changed on a daily basis as new information emerges, and there has been a massive proliferation of comment on social media and other online platforms about the virus and other health issues.
Clinical advice, data and scientific evidence have been contested, revised, used and misused with dramatic and sometimes tragic consequences, and yet the digital record of this is fragile and difficult to access.
Objectives
The main objective within the project is to develop a collection of health-related information in the UKWA while also using the development of this collection to explore how to ethically capture and describe this information for posterity.
The project will also use the new collection to experiment with options for metadata, computational analysis, ethics and rights issues, and expect to make recommendations to make web archives more representative, inclusive and open for health research.
Further Information
Send an email to the CUL Digital Preservation email address with any questions.
As the project develops, there will be an active collecting programme with associated events and workshops.
Follow the project on Discourse.
View the Talking About Health collection on the UKWA.
Project updates can also be found using the #ArchiveOfTomorrow hashtag on Twitter.