Website Rationalisation

During 2007, the Government began the Transformational Government Website Rationalisation programme to bring together information on the web. The National Archives began to collect archive snapshots of these websites before they changed or moved. Please click on the links below to view the current collection.

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

The UK Government Website Rationalisation programme is part of the Transformational Government Strategy. This strategy aims to use technology to join up and share government services rather than duplicate them.

There are currently several thousand central government websites of varying sizes and scopes and this ´web estate´ is large and potentially difficult for some citizens to use. To address this, the Central Office of Information (COI) http://www.coi.gov.uk/index.php) is coordinating the rationalisation of the large number of government websites into a more streamlined set. The rationalisation programme aims to organise the information on these sites in a more logical way, with much website content being converged onto several supersites. The Directgov website is intended to deliver all information required by citizens in an easily accessible way through the creation of a single central point of access.The Businesslink website provides a dedicated channel for businesses. The Website Rationalisation programme began in January 2007, and is scheduled to run until the end of 2011.

UK Government Web Rationalisation Programme: Further information for colleagues in Government

During the project, government organisations are required to liaise with COI to discuss all the websites within their remit, and to agree on the future of the content of those sites. Following these discussions, COI will update its project plan detailing the migration/change dates of each website, and pass the information to The National Archives. If you wish to make sure that your websites are being scheduled for archiving, please direct your enquiries to the Website rationalisation team at the COI in the first instance. The COI are coordinating the closure or merging of websites under this programme, and negotiating change schedules at COI in the first instance. If you have a scheduled migration/change date agreed with COI, then this date will be given to The National Archives for scheduling the archiving of your site. We carry out our archiving on a quarterly basis, at the beginning of the quarter during which the sites have been scheduled for migration. This is to ensure that we capture each site before it disappears. Please do make sure that your websites remain live at least until the date agreed with COI, and preferably for around 6 months after that date.

There is no need for government departments to contact The National Archives directly to discuss closure of their sites. If we have any technical issues to discuss regarding the archiving of the site, we will contact government departments directly.

In order to ensure that your websites are technically ´archivable´, please refer to the guidance document issued by COI. This document provides advice on constructing a website which is easy to preserve. The basic rule of thumb, however, is that a website which follows good accessibility standards will be easy to archive.