Collection guides

About the collection

As well as the annual archive of UK websites (which includes many news-based sites) we are archiving selected UK news sites on a daily or weekly basis since September 2013.

We archive 2,000 news websites, including those produced by newspapers, news broadcasters, and news services developed independently for the web, with an even geographical spread across the UK. The sites we are archiving include Huffington Post, BBC News, Wales Online, The Exeter Daily, The Northern Echo and The Voice.

We have a special interest in archiving 'hyperlocal' news sites produced by local communities across the UK.

Twitter feeds from news websites archived by the Library appear as they are published on a feed on display in the front area of the Newsroom, so you can see the news arriving that will be acquired by the Library.

What is available online?

The Open UK Web Archive is a smaller collection of selected websites archived by the British Library and its partners since 2003, with permissions from the owners. Selected websites will continue to be added to this open access collection, again with the permission of website owners.

You can search UK news sites from 1996 onward using Shine, our prototype search engine that queries the JISC UK Web Domain Dataset (1996-2013), a subset of the Internet Archive’s web collection that relates to the UK.

What is available in our Reading Rooms?

The Legal Deposit UK Web Archive can be accessed on Reading Room computers. Catalogue records at title level can also be traced via Explore the British Library. Users should note that the dates of archived web pages wherever they are seen are for when they were archived, not necessarily when they were first published online. Also, although archiving began in September 2013, many of the news sites archived will have pages going back several years earlier.