Information on web archiving

The technology of the World Wide Web is constantly evolving, and this presents many new challenges. The National Archives is therefore working with national and international partners to improve and develop new techniques for website archiving.

The National Archives is a founder member of the UK Web Archiving Consortium, which is working to develop a common, shared infrastructure for the selective archiving of websites. The other partners in this consortium are The British Library, The Wellcome Trust, The Higher Education Funding Council for England, The National Library of Wales, and The National Library of Scotland.

The European Archive is a non-profit organisation that was founded to build an 'Internet library', with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.

The UK Web Archiving Consortium launched a pilot project in June 2004. This was an initial 2-year project to investigate the issues of selection and the technical challenges involved. During the project, approximately 6,000 websites have been collected and archived. Each consortium member selects and captures specific websites, with the permission of the website owners, using shared hardware and software tools. The software used to carry out the archiving processes was PANDORA Digital Archiving System (PANDAS), developed by the National Library of Australia. The future of the consortium is being developed in 2008.

The British Library is now providing a web archiving service for the consortium using Web Curator Tool (WCT). The National Archives is using this service, as well as working with the European Archive. This allows flexibility in our approach. We can arrange bulk harvesting with the European Archive and individual ad-hoc crawling and testing with WCT.

The websites collected by The National Archives during this project have been made publicly available as part of the UK Government Web Archive.

The National Archives is also working with the European Archive and the UK Web Archiving Consortium to increase the range of websites that we collect on a regular basis, and to develop improved methods for searching the content of the archived sites.

We welcome your comments and feedback on the UK Government Web Archive and the future of the service. Please email us at: webarchive@nationalarchives.gov.uk

Search the UK Government Web Archive

You can search for a website by entering a web address and clicking on the Search button: