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Notes for webmasters
Archiving websites
UK Government web rationalisation programme
Government is rationalising the number of websites it has, to provide a more user-friendly experience for the citizen. This activity is being managed by the Central Office of Information (COI).Continue to agree your closure or convergence schedule with Directgov or BusinessLink, and pass this information on to the Transformational Government team at the Central Office of Information (COI). The COI hold the Data Quality Officer responsibilities for reporting on progress. They will pass your information on to us so that we can schedule the necessary web archiving.
Please don't close your site ahead of schedule, as this will prevent us from being able to archive it. Generally we need six weeks' notice for changes to the closure schedule.
Web archiving guidance
Guidance is available from the Web Continuity pages on the Digital People Network. To register, go to Communities of Practice for Local Government.
Guidance is aimed at central government website managers and provides information to ensure that your website is archived regularly and accurately by The National Archives. It also provides best practice guidance for web developers on website creation and maintenance, to support the archiving process.
How we archive your website
We use two methods to collect websites. The main collection is harvested by the European Archive and a smaller selection is harvested via the UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC). Information on linking to each can be found below:Linking to archives collected by the European Archive
You can provide links to an index of all available snapshots of a website, or to specific, dated snapshots of a website in the collection.
Here's an example of how you should create an href for linking to an index of all available snapshots of a website:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/*/http://www.mod.uk
This predictable URL will link to an index page showing all available snapshots of the MoD website collected since January 1997. To create links to other departmental websites substitute your website name for 'www.mod.uk'.
To link to specific archived instances of a website, you can follow links from the index page, and obtain the URL of the specified snapshot. For example:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20080107211607/http://www.mod.uk/defenceinternet/home
Linking to archives collected by UKWAC
If you're linking to the smaller collection archived by UKWAC, you can also follow the links at http://www.webarchive.org.uk
Using the 'Archived by The National Archives' logo
Government webmasters may wish to provide a link from their website to the relevant index of archived snapshots.
To facilitate this, we provide an 'Archived by The National Archives' logo which may be placed on a website to indicate that it is being collected as part of the web archive. To download this logo, simply right-click on the image and click "Save Picture As...". This logo should then be linked to the relevant archive index page by setting the image as the correct link for the archived site.
To ensure legibility, this logo should not be reproduced at a smaller size.
logo 1: 170 x 125
Firewall issues
Departmental security policies may require that firewalls are configured to block access to 'archive' websites, including the European Archive and UKWAC. This may prevent staff from accessing the collection.
The http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk URL only provides access to The National Archives' web archive of UK government websites. Access to the collection through a firewall will minimally require the following URL to be opened up:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk
UKWAC collects websites selected by the consortium partners only. Access to the collection through a firewall will minimally require the following URL to be opened up:
Feedback
We undertake quality assurance testing on all archived websites in the collection, though problems may develop over time. We therefore particularly welcome feedback from departmental webmasters on any issues relating to particular sites. If you wish to notify us of any issues, or have any comments on the web archive in general, please email us: webarchive@nationalarchives.gov.uk
