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
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