Conference Agenda

In 2019, the National Library of Singapore's (NLS) legislation was updated to empower it to archive websites ending in “.sg” without the need for written permission. This allowed NLS to comprehensively collect and preserve Singapore's Internet landscape by conducting large scale domain crawling of .sg websites.

Since then, about 80,000 websites are archived every year and made available on the WebArchiveSG portal. However, due to copyright laws, these .sg websites could only be view at the NLS on a designated computer terminal. Permission had to be given by the website owners to make them accessible online. This meant that about 88% of the collection had access restrictions which greatly impeded the use and visibility of the collection due to the need for library users to visit the NLS to view them.

After five years of growing the collection and with greater awareness and support for web archiving, NLS wanted to explore how it could make the collection more accessible to users in 2024. A discussion with its legal team was initiated to relook at the copyright laws and study how online access could be applied to the web archives collection. This led to the creation of an online access criteria for websites based on the Fair Use principle that the archived website is not a 100% replica of the live website. A quick takedown policy was also set in place to handle public requests promptly.

With the above new criteria, the bulk of the domain crawl collection could be released for online access. Websites with owners who had previously specified onsite access and undesirable websites (e.g. adult and gambling websites) would remain accessible at the NLS only. NLS implemented online access to its collection in the 4th quarter of 2025.

This presentation will cover NLS' online access criteria for websites, its application to its web archives collection, operational changes made to allow online access via its WebArchiveSG, as well as learning points from this experience.

Our web archive contains more than 8 billion digital objects. It contains the record of over twenty-five years of government information released to the public, yet we face significant challenges encouraging research engagement and use of this resource. Barriers to increased access to the web archive include practical constraints (which limit our ability to release the dataset to potential researchers), and the Takedown Policy (a reclosure policy which allows for the removal of sensitive content at any time). Another challenge is our own incomplete understanding of what researchers need and want from the archive, as well as a lack of understanding by users of the complexities and limitations of the web archiving process.

This presentation will introduce a project conducted at our institution designed to investigate and understand researcher needs. The project was funded by the Archives’ own Strategic Research Fund, an internal funding scheme reserved to make disruptive research possible and promote inclusive practice. In October 2025, workshops were hosted to determine what researchers want from our web archive, and subsequently we are able to share some of our hopes and plans for the future. This work was our first project focused on research users on their own, rather than general web archive users.

We asked potential researchers what they need from the web archive in order to succeed and introduced ethical constraints that we face when sharing our own data. This enabled us to make recommendations for future work with the web archive that takes into account practical and ethical constraints around the release of datasets, as well as increase researcher understanding of what the web archive is, and how they can use it.

The workshops aimed at engaging both web archive users and those curious about the potential of web archives. We invited both groups in the hope of responding to the need for equitable access in public sector web archives (Hartland, 2023)^[1] and a desire to follow the UN principles of good governance, which includes being “participatory … equitable and inclusive,” (Schafer & Winters, 2021)^[2] in web archives more generally.

This presentation will discuss the future access scenarios that were proposed in the workshops, scaled from least to most computational and resource intensive. By examining what researchers both need and want from future digital preservation infrastructures, we will explore where they draw the line on computational intensity. The findings offer insight into how our web archive can evolve to meet the demands of its research community, balancing ambition with sustainability. We hope sharing both our findings and methodological approach can be useful to other web archiving institutions.

[1] Nicole Hartland, ‘Web Archives for All? Towards Equitable Access to UK Public Sector Web Archives,’ iPRES, (Online, 2024).

[2] Valerie Schafer & Jane Winters, ‘The Value of Web Archives,’ International Journal of Digital Humanities, (Springer, 2021).

Foucauldian discourse analysis examines how language, power, and knowledge intersect to influence what is considered "true" and shape individual and societal identities. In analogy, Deconstruction theory involves identifying binary oppositions (like truth/error), reversing the traditional privilege of one term, and revealing their interdependence in the discourse (known as ‘Violent Hierarchies’). However, privileging certain terms or silencing others is a dangerous concept that may have a direct impact on democratic institutions.

The internet constitutes today’s digital public sphere, and an interdisciplinary range of scientists try to identify and develop best practices for selecting, collecting, preserving and providing access to its content. Archive silences refer to the absent or distorted documentation of certain groups, stories, and perspectives within historical records, leading to gaps in the collective memory and understanding of the past.

In this paper we argue that archive silences in the digital public sphere are either a result of, or they reflect power relations that privilege certain terms, and this has major detrimental impact on democratic institutions. We will try to establish whether and how this relation of archive silences and democracy is manifested.

Towards this end, in this paper a text mining process is employed to analyze results of the query 'Archive Silences and Democracy', within the large volumes of information contained in the 40 most popular pages returned by the google (US) search engine. Artificial Intelligence algorithms are used to examine the correlations between these terms, create clusters of concepts, and determine those terms that may strongly mediate meanings between such groups of concepts. Finally, the results are graphically represented in a network form where influential words are depicted as nodes and the strong interconnections between them are represented as edges using the Infranodus software.

Results show that archive silences are strongly related to state political censoring (even in democracies, e.g. during transitions from dictatorships). Thus, they impose selective perspectives on the construction of social memory. They are also used both in uncovering and silencing history (colonialism, immigration) and they usually are a result of corrupted autocracies. Archive silences exist with respect to human rights violations, freedom of press, they might be gender based, they may hinder the quest for accountability and justice, or they can be related to infrastructure inadequacies in disasters.

As shown on the constructed network, these silences are not accidental but result from factors like biased collection practices, structural inequalities, and the inherent limitations of institutions, which can inadvertently or purposefully exclude certain voices, with obvious negative impact on democracy.

Addressing archival silences involves critically examining the history presented, recognizing the power dynamics involved, and seeking out the marginalized narratives that remain unheard. We believe that the proposed methodology contributes towards all the above, as the text to network transformation and graph metrics avoid subjectivity and distortion of concepts, without imposing external semantic structures. Moreover, they can be especially helpful in bringing potential conceptual gaps that are highlighted in the transformed geometrical space.