| Summary: | The World Wide Web is enormous and in constant flux, with more web content lost to time than is currently accessible via the live web. The growing body of archived web material available to researchers is potentially immensely valuable as a record of important aspects of modern society, but there have previously been few tools available to facilitate research using archived web materials. The research presented in this chapter used hyperlink data extracted from the Jisc UK Web Domain Dataset covering the period from 1996 to 2010 to undertake a longitudinal analysis of the United Kingdom (UK) national web domain, .uk, focusing on the four largest second level domains: .co.uk, .org.uk, .gov.uk, and .ac.uk. We explore the growth of these domains, and examine the link density within and between them. Next we look in more detail at the academic second- level domain, .ac.uk, to understand the relationship between link density among UK academic institutions and measures of affiliation, status, performance and geographic distance. Overall, these results are used both to understand the growth and structure of the .uk domain, but also to demonstrate the benefits and challenges of this type of analysis more generally.
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