The UK Web Archive is hosted by the British Library, and contains snapshots of the UK-web (.uk sites) dating back to the 1990s (webarchivering). The Archive contains websites that publish research, that reflect the diversity of lives, interests and activities throughout the UK, and demonstrate web innovation. This includes “grey literature” sites: those that carry briefings, reports, policy statements, and other ephemeral but significant forms of information. Since April 2013 the British Library has begun to archive the whole of the UK web domain, under the terms of the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations 2013.Search (open source tool Apache Solr) is possible by Title of Website, Full Text or URL with or without a restriction by Date. The user can browse by Subject, Special Collection or Alphabetical List of Website Titles. Special Collections are groups of websites brought together on a particular theme by librarians, curators and other specialists, often working in collaboration with key organisations in the field. They can be events-based (e.g The Olympic & Paralympic Games 2012), topical (e.g. The Credit Crunch Collection) or subject-oriented (e.g. The British Countryside Collections).Visualisation options are available for the search results: 3D Wall, N-gram and Tag Cloud (prototype). All are welcome to use the UK Web Archive, free to view via the Web itself — and to nominate sites that are not yet in the collections. The UK Web Archive is designed to appeal to users across a wide spectrum of interest and knowledge: the general reader, the teacher, the journalist, the policy maker, the academic and personal researcher, and many more besides. The UK Web Archive is provided by the British Library in partnership with the National Library of Wales, JISC and The Wellcome Library. Other contributors are the National Archives and the National Library of Scotland In cooperation with the Live Art Development Agency, The Society of Friends Library, The Women’s Library at London Metropolitan University and other key institutions special collections were build.
Example of the presentation of a web archive (webarchief) to the general public, aiming at researchers as well. A small experiment with historians showed that the internet (archive) could become a rich source in itself when corpus linguistics, data manipulation, clustering algorithms, and distant reading are applied.