Sources and Resources Into the Dark Domain: The UKWeb Archive as a Source for theContemporaryHistoryofPublicHealth

With themigration of the written record from paper to digital format, archivists and historians must urgently consider howweb content should be conserved, retrieved and analysed. The British Library has recently acquireda largenumberofUKdomainwebsites, captured1996–2010,which is colloquially termed the Dark Domain Archive while technical issues surrounding user access are resolved. This article reports the results of an invitedpilot project that exploresmethodological issues surrounding use of this archive. It asks how the relationship between UK public health and local government was represented on the web, drawing on the ‘declinist’ historiography to frame its questions. It points up some difficulties in developing an aggregate picture of web content due to duplication of sites. It also highlights their potential for thematic and discourse analysis, using both text and image, illustrated through an argument about the contradictory rationale for public health policy under New Labour.