Scottish Parliamentary Election 2026
The National Library of Scotland is collecting and archiving publications from the web about the Scottish Parliamentary election this year.
13 April 2026Blog series UK Web Archive
Author Eilidh MacGlone, Web Archivist, National Library of Scotland
The National Library of Scotland is leading another collection of material published to the web around the subject of the upcoming Parliamentary election in May. Archiving these publications before they come down after the campaign period keeps copies safe for future readers and ensures that we are preserving priority material for legal deposit.
Index page of the 'Scottish Parliamentary election, 6 May 1999 websites downloaded 6th May 1999' CD-R. CC BY 4.0
Our first Parliamentary collection, titled 'Scottish Parliamentary election, 6 May 1999 websites downloaded 6th May 1999' is backed up to preservation storage, but it may interest readers to know that the two original CD-R copies containing party websites, downloaded by permission before web was included within legal deposit in 2013, are also available to call from our catalogue.
The upcoming collection will prioritise the following areas, in addition to political parties:
- Public and Community Engagement
- Political parties - local
- News and media
- Journalism and Commentary
- Campaigning groups
- Think tanks and research institutes
- Trade Unions
- Candidates
Where we can agree a licence with website owners, copies will be made available on the web archive’s website later this year.
They just want researchers in the enclosure to feel enriched and stimulated. 'The Enclosure' is what archivists call the shadowy world outside their archives in which so many people are trapped. xkcd
Collection metadata
Once the work is completed, we will publish the metadata in csv and Json format with an accompanying datasheet and data dictionary, which explain how the collection and the metadata prepared. These datasets can be used to measure link rot, gap analysis within topics and data visualisation; these include the 2021 Parliamentary collection and we plan to add more over time.
Reusing collections data
Examples of how researchers are beginning to look at these metadata as data can be found in the work of the Workshop Web Archives Collections as data DHNB 2025 .
Histogram expressing the counts for sampled terms used in the description of the Scottish Churches collection completed between 2016-19. 'Web Archives Collections as data' workshop coordinators.
Data visualisations of the lives and deaths of Scottish websites, exhibited at last November’s fascinating, excellent show Digital Ghosts exhibited at InSpace, was created by combining the National Library of Scotland’s web archive datasets with others – and a deal of insight and developing talent in a project led by Dr Andrea Kocsis, in collaboration with multimedia artist Dorsey Kaufmann and vizualisation developer Parker Kaufmann with Informatics Master of Science students. These visualisations can still be viewed on the project partner Feeling Data’s website.
We will be posting short updates on the collection’s progress here over the next few months, including opportunities to get involved.
UK Web Archive series
This blog post is part of the UK Web Archive series. The UK Web Archive was established in 2004 to collect, make accessible and preserve web resources of scholarly and cultural importance from the UK domain.
The collection is selective, built on nominations from subject specialists and other external experts. The British Library prioritises websites that:
- reflect the diversity of lives, interests and activities throughout the UK
- contain research value or are of research interest
- feature political, cultural, social and economic events of national interest
- demonstrate innovative use of the web.
Find out more
Our collections
You can access millions of collection items for free. Including books, newspapers, maps, sound recordings, photographs, patents and stamps.
Research
+2
