> Number 10 Downing Street, MI5 and the Cabinet Office are just some of the
> government departments to have their web presence immortalised in the
> first-ever archive of government websites. The National Archives at Kew
> has successfully stored the first six-monthly 'snapshots' of 40 government
> sites in its Web Archive, which will be preserving over 50 government
> websites as historic records. The archive is free and can be accessed on
> www.pro.gov.uk/webarchive
>
> Since the Web Archive's launch in September, The National Archives at Kew
> has been taking weekly snapshots of 11 rapidly-changing websites, such as
> the Hutton Inquiry and Number 10 Downing Street. The sites included in
> this six-monthly trawl are more static in their content than the 11 sites
> already archived and include the Security Services, the Inland Revenue and
> the Northern Ireland Office.
>
> David Ryan, Head of Archive Services at The National Archives, said:
> 'Websites, such as the Number 10 Downing Street site, provide a very
> important insight into the political and social world we live in today.
> We are delighted to have successfully preserved 50 sites and hope that
> eventually all government sites will be archived'.
>
> David Thomas, The National Archives' Director of Government and Archival
> Services, said:
> 'This Web Archive is one of many things we have done to ensure that
> digital records are preserved for future generations, including an archive
> to store digital documents such as word files and e-mails. We aim to
> ensure that there is a seamless transition as we move from the
> preservation of paper to digital records.'
>
> The National Archives has contracted the world leaders in web archiving,
> The Internet Archive, to set up the new Web Archive, initially for one
> year.
>
> The websites have been collected using specially designed crawler
> software, which retrieves and stores pages on the site. The sites are
> then catalogued, stored and accessed using The Internet Archive's Wayback
> Machine software. You can enter the URL of the website you wish to view
> and then select by date from the archived versions available.
>
> Latest news on Digital Preservation @ The National Archives
> http://www.pro.gov.uk/about/preservation/digital/default.htm
>
> *With apologies for cross-posting*
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