Despite recent challenges, the UK Web Archive team remains dedicated to safeguarding the nation’s online heritage. We are hoping to restore the UK Web Archive towards the middle of 2026.
29 January 2026Blog series UK Web Archive
Author Nicola Bingham, Lead Curator, UK Web Archive
The UK Web Archive (UKWA) has been archiving the nation’s online life for two decades. Since our establishment in 2004, we’ve captured a rich and varied record of the UK on the web. From documenting general elections, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic, to preserving everyday websites that reflect our culture and communities, the UKWA provides a unique snapshot of our digital heritage.
Although the UKWA website remains offline following the cyber-attack in October 2023, the behind-the-scenes work has never stopped. Our team is continuing to curate and safeguard new material every day and will make our collections accessible to the public once again this year.
While recovery and upgrades to our systems continue, UKWA curators are actively collecting fresh web content. Using crawlers hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), we are securely archiving new websites in the cloud.
We’re also embracing new tools. Last year, we trialled Browsertrix, a powerful service developed by Web Recorder. Browsertrix helps us capture complex and dynamic websites—such as interactive pages and social media posts—that were previously very difficult to archive. This innovation allows us to preserve an even more diverse and representative record of life in the UK.
Even as we work on recovery, 2025 was an exciting year for new collections:
The Datasheets for Datasets project aims to improve description and documentation so that researchers can understand what’s in a dataset derived from web archives — including provenance, how the dataset was constructed, its structure, known biases, and use cases — much in the way a datasheet does for machine‑learning data.
The project brings structured, transparent documentation practices to web archive datasets to help researchers use datasets of the curated metadata created in the web archiving process.
The Datasheets for Web Archives Toolkit explains how datasheets are created and provides examples for web archive datasets.
Data sheets for specific collections, like the UK General Election 2010, are available for download within the British Library repository.
After two decades of preserving the UK web, we’re proud of how far the Archive has come. We are hoping to restore the UK Web Archive towards the middle of this year and, in the meantime, we’ll be marking our 21st with a special celebration. Despite recent challenges, the UK Web Archive team remains dedicated to safeguarding the nation’s online heritage for future generations. We’re excited to continue expanding our collections and to relaunch public access soon.
Thank you for your ongoing support—and if you come across a website you think should be saved, don’t hesitate to get in touch at web-archivist@bl.uk.
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:
You can access millions of collection items for free. Including books, newspapers, maps, sound recordings, photographs, patents and stamps.
