Technology Intersecting Culture: The British Slave Trade Legacies Project

‘British Slave Trade Legacies’ is a web archiving project that collected websites and online material related to and generated from the 2007 bicentenary of Parliament abolishing the British slave trade. The Internet Archive donated their Archive-It service to harvest websites for this collection, and now provides public access to digital objects within it. This paper describes two issues that the project raised: firstly, the validity of the 2007 anniversary as marked by cultural stakeholders; secondly, the challenges of documenting it, thereby adding to the historical legacy material of this topic. The archivist's role in the 21st century will also be discussed in the context of new digital age challenges.