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
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