Seminar on “Research and the Web Archive”

Maureen Pennock (British Library) and Ed Pinsent (ULCC) will give a seminar on “Research and the Web Archive”  at the University of Bath on Friday 25 November 2011, from 13.30 to 15.00.

This seminar will focus on using archived web sites and collections of web archives for scholarly research.

A presentation on the current state of play will be given, followed by a brainstorming session on research uses of the UK Web Archive. This will address issues such as:

• What types of research questions could be answered (part or whole) by the UK Web Archive?
• Which disciplines do you think would/could make most use of the UK Web Archive and why?
• What tools or analytical techniques should we be considering?
• How might the research opportunities of a selective web archive differ from those of a domain-level web archive?

Who Should Attend?

This seminar is open to UKOLN staff and members of the University of Bath with an interest in research uses of Web archives. If places are available, others with interests in this area will also be able to attend.

Online Booking for Event

An Eventbrite online booking form has been set up for those wishing to attend this seminar.

Biographical Details

Maureen Pennock is the Engagement & Liaison Manager for the UK Web Archive, based at the British Library. She joined the British Library in 2008 as preservation project manager for the Web Archive and, after a brief stint as a digital curator, returned to the web archiving team earlier this year. She has a long career in digital preservation and curation, having previously worked at UKOLN for the Digital Curation Centre (2005 – 2008) and in the Netherlands (2001 – 2005) on earlier digital preservation projects. She has spoken at numerous conferences and published widely on several different aspects of digital preservation and curation, ranging from authenticity and lifecycle management, to email preservation and archiving websites & blogs. She can be contacted at maureen.pennock@bl.uk and is @mopennock on Twitter.

Ed Pinsent is an archivist and records manager based at the University of London Computer Centre with many years’ experience in digital preservation and web archiving. He has been collecting archive copies of JISC project websites since 2005, via the UK Web Archive; as part of this he has dealt with issues of rights clearance and crawler management. Ed also contributed substantially to the JISC Preservation of Web Resources Handbook, managed the AIDA (Assessing Institutional Digital Assets) project and contributed to the CARDIO project on managing research data. Ed also teaches several modules for the Digital Preservation Training Programme, and in 2011 has done consultancy work for the Parliamentary Archives, the Women’s Library and others.