‘Archive of Tomorrow’ Lessons and Reflections: A Panel on Health (Mis)information in the Web Archive

Image Caption: Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh 1906. Copyright Lothian Health Services Archive. Please contact for permissions and further information.

The Web Archiving & Preservation Working Group invites you to join a Panel Session with the project team of Archive of Tomorrow. The team will reflect on the challenges to curating online health information in the context of the ‘Infodemic’ of the COVID-19 era.

More about the Archive of Tomorrow project: https://www.nls.uk/about-us/working-with-others/archive-of-tomorrow/

The Panel

Alice Austin, Web Archivist, University of Edinburgh

Leontien Talboom, Web Archivist and Technical Analyst, Cambridge University Libraries

Cui Cui, Web Archivist, Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University and PhD candidate, Sheffield University

Mark Haydn, Metadata Analyst, National Library of Scotland

Jasmine Hide, Rights Officer, National Library of Scotland

Eilidh MacGlone, Web Archivist, National Library of Scotland

Mary Garner, Project Manager, National Library of Scotland

More about the Panel Session

As the pilot project for Archive of Tomorrow nears conclusion, the project team will come together to discuss the lessons they have learned over the past 12 months building ‘Talking About Health’ – a web archive of health (mis)information.

From defining ‘Wellbeing’ to crafting content warnings, this team has tackled head on some of the most challenging issues in web archiving – and digital archiving – catalysed by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated ‘Infodemic’. What role does the archive play in a climate of public distrust of even ‘official information’ and hostile disinformation campaigns? How can archives and libraries provide clarity on determining reliability of information at a time when Twitter’s policy on their ‘verified’ badge dominates mainstream media headlines?

In this panel session, we will hear from the Web Archivists on their selection strategies and coping mechanisms for appraising difficult and dangerous information. We’ll also hear from the Rights Officer who liaised with content creators about how their websites would be ‘labelled’ in connection with a project about misinformation. The Metadata Analyst will discuss strategies and challenges to making this collection discoverable and usable for a broad range of researchers. The Project Manager will share insights into managing work carried out on legal deposit infrastructure across LDL and non-LDL partners. Together, they will provide valuable insights into the, sometimes surprising, successes of archiving health information online and the challenges that remain for future research and development.

A discussion will follow the short panel presentations from the project team. Attendees are encouraged to tweet their thoughts and questions using #ArchiveOfTomorrow and/or through the project’s open forum at https://ukwa.discourse.group/.

Recordings 

Playlist of all recordings

Introduction to Archive of Tomorrow - Sara Day Thomson, University of Edinburgh

Lessons learnt from collecting online discourse about trans health - Alice Austin, Web Archivist, University of Edinburgh

Searching for material and research-ready collections - Leontien Talboom, Web Archivist and Technical Analyst, Cambridge University Libraries

Archiving Social Media Content - Cui Cui, Web Archivist, Bodleian Libraries at Oxford Universityand PhD candidate, Sheffield University

Working with Talking about Health metadata - Mark Haydn, Metadata Analyst, National Library of Scotland

Lessons in rights management and access in the Talking About Health Collection - Jasmine Hide, Rights Officer, National Library of Scotland

EQIA & The Archive of Tomorrow - Mary Garner, Project Manager, National Library of Scotland

Legal deposit web archiving in review - Eilidh MacGlone, Web Archivist, National Library of Scotland

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