Chapter We’re all experts now? Archiving public health discourse in the UK Web Archive

Overview & Synopsis

Emerging from COVID-19 collecting initiatives that underscored the fragility of online health discourse, the Archive of Tomorrow was an ambitious collaborative project that set out to curate a representative and diverse collection of public health websites in the UK. The project encountered a number of challenges, such as technical barriers in capturing interactive and dynamic sites, ethical considerations concerning how disputed or outdated information might be responsibly made available to researchers, and philosophical questions about how ‘health information' is to be defined. This chapter reports on the outcomes of the project and discusses future directions for improving the production and use of large-scale archived web collections.