Following on from earlier comments today, I disagree with the suggestion that official archives are ‘not an effective substitute’ for some of those who wish to access web content. The Conservatives’ decision to add a robot blocker to its website, resulting in the removal of past speeches previously archived by the Internet Archive, demonstrates precisely the opposite. The only place now where one can reliably access all of these speeches is the official archive - the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian Library. Although they are a useful and convenient resource, web archives will continue to be vulnerable to the whims of website-owners.

 

While 10 years’ speeches have been deleted from the Conservatives’ website, 120-years’ are available at the Bodleian. Most of the speeches since the 1990s are in electronic format and do not require a visit to the Bodleian in person; and there are no access restrictions on speeches as there would be on other papers, such as Shadow Cabinet discussions, for instance. A list of the approximately 60,000 speeches held is nearing completion and will shortly be made available online. Ultimately, an online, searchable free-text database in envisaged, involving the digitisation of earlier paper records, which would be a far more versatile tool for researchers than the clunkiness of searching a web archive. While the Bodleian might not be everyone’s first thought after searching the Conservatives’ website, it came up in the top 6 of a Google search for ‘Conservative Party speeches’ (3 of the preceding links being to articles concerning the current controversy).

 

Clearly, in the case of smaller political parties which may not be able, or inclined, to provide an official archive, web archives serve a particularly useful purpose. The papers of the BNP for example are not, as far as I am aware, deposited in any repository or available for research. But any institutional website is naturally presenting an edited version of itself for public consumption. Would you really have expected the Conservative Party’s online speeches archive to contain every speech that was made, even those which were poorly-received, inconsequential, or a complete flop? By its nature, such a website has to be subjective. On the other hand, information kept in the Party’s official archive contains the ‘warts-and-all’ account; the complete picture, rather than the inherently short-term content of a website whose sole purpose is to proselytize, not to act as a public database of information. Indeed, those users who search no further than the web will miss out on significant additional information.

 

It is a misnomer that, ‘The website gives it a context’. Speeches are reproduced on the Conservatives’ website, in standardised form, but minus significant metadata, such as that the speech was issued to press agencies in advance, for release at a predetermined time on a predetermined date. On the other hand, this is all evident in the speeches held at the Bodleian, which sometimes also include earlier drafts containing author’s annotations, ancillary notes about the target audience, and opinion polls following delivery.

 

Despite the reservations expressed above, the Bodleian is actively involved in web-archiving, and has been doing so since 2011. Although Memento, which Kevin Ashley advocated earlier, is an exceptionally easy tool to use, it still doesn’t appear to be able to get around the problem of website owners who might want to prevent access to their pages, for whatever reason. Legally, the Bodleian is only able to archive websites with the express permission of website owners. Web archives provide a valuable supplement to use of official/traditional archives, but that’s all. Clearly we all want more online access, and one trend starting to become apparent is that students and historians are increasingly choosing to cite web pages containing a document in their footnotes, rather than the reference to the original document held at the Bodleian, whose purpose is partly to guarantee its long-term preservation. Yet this relies on the URLs remaining in existence, unchanged.

 

Until website-owners no longer have the right to block harvesting of their sites, the vulnerability of web archives, and their value as research tools, must surely remain in doubt.

Jeremy McIlwaine

Conservative Party Archivist

Bodleian Library

---

From: Archivists, conservators and records managers. [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of l [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 18 November 2013 20:16
To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: Re: Conservatives erase Internet history

The Conservative Party's official Archive at the Bodleian Library is keeping a record of the speeches which were stored on the web, as I also understand the People's History Museum, the Labour Party's official Archive, is keeping a record of Labour speeches on the web

-----Original Message-----
From: Clea Hodgson <[log in to unmask]>
To: ARCHIVES-NRA <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Mon, 18 Nov 2013 19:29
Subject: Re: Conservatives erase Internet history

Dear Kevin (and all),

 

Surely what is most worrying about this case is not that the speeches themselves have been deleted from the current website but that the Tories have in fact prevented internet archiving sites such as 'The Wayback Machine' from being able to display any of the previously archived content, thus making any internet archiving efforts futile. As described in this article

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/13/conservative-party-archive-speeches-internet

this is done by altering the 'robots.txt' file which prevents crawlers visiting the pages the speeches have been stored on, and most importantly "The Internet Archive, which maintains the world's largest archive of old and defunct webpages, deletes its records of any site blocked by robots.txt."

So the history of their website has, as far as I understand it, been successfully deleted, though the speeches may exist in other formats elsewhere. One of these places is the BL which has been archiving the website since 2004, however this still means that the years 2000-2003 are unavailable and also that it is far less readily accessible, as you must visit the BL to get access.

 

I was interested to hear about Memento, but unfortunately this seems to require the cooperation of the website owners, which is surely not the case as internet archiving software has been blocked. As the Memento site says about viewing webpages as they previously existed: "Obviously this will only work if previous versions are available somewhere on the Web. But if they are, and if they are on servers that support the Memento framework, you will get to them."

 

(Kevin I wondered if you have attempted to find the speech pages using Memento?)

 

I see the vulnerability of websites being that they are records in the hands of their creators and, just as in the paper world, they can be destroyed if the creator so chooses. The transient nature of websites is what has allowed this act of destruction to take place, as it may be commonly accepted that websites are ephemeral, unlike if vast quantities of paper records were incinerated, which would likely cause far greater uproar. Although, as others have rightfully pointed out, the speeches do exist elsewhere, this is a clear move to prevent democratic universal internet access to particular information about the party.

 

Clea Hodgson  

 

In a message dated 18/11/2013 12:37:40 GMT Standard Time, [log in to unmask] writes:

Ok - happy to accept that, and sorry if I misrepresented your views.

On 18/11/13 12:18, Maria Sienkiewicz wrote:
> I'm not sure our views are so different - when I said 'properly managed archives' I was not ruling out web archives
>
> Maria Sienkiewicz  l  Group Archivist  l  Barclays Group Archives
> Tel +44 (0)161 946 3036  l  Int  2880 3036  l  Fax +44 (0)161 946 0226  l  Email [log in to unmask]
> Barclays Group Archives, Dallimore Rd, Wythenshawe, Manchester, M23 9JA (internal mailvan 49)
>
> Discover more about the history of Barclays at http://group.barclays.com/about-barclays/about-us#barclays-history
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