Legal Deposit Web Archives and the Digital Humanities: A Universe of Lost Opportunity

Legal deposit libraries have archived the web for over a decade. Several nations, supported by legal deposit regulations, have introduced comprehensive national domain web crawling, an essential part of the national library remit to collect, preserve, and make accessible a nation's intellectual and cultural heritage. Scholars have traditionally been the chief beneficiaries of legal deposit collections; in the case of web archives, the potential for research extends to contemporary materials, and to Digital Humanities text and data mining approaches. To date, however, little work has evaluated whether legal deposit regulations support computational approaches to research using national web archive data.

This poster introduces the Digital Library Futures project, which examines the impact of electronic legal deposit in the United Kingdom. The full poster abstract can be found at the following link on the DH2018 website.