Cookies

Cookies are small files saved on your computer, phone or tablet that allow us to store information about how you use The National Archives website, such as the pages you visit or any preferences you set. They help us to provide you with a better experience.

We use some essential cookies in order to make the website work, and some that are optional, including analytics cookies. We need your consent to use some of them. They cannot be used to identify you personally.

Why do we use cookies?

We use cookies to improve the services that we provide and to ensure they work for you by:

  • Measuring how many people are using these services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are working efficiently
  • Enabling a service to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information several times during one task
  • Recognising that you may already have provided a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested

We classify the cookies we use on our website in the following categories:

  • Analytics cookies (optional)
  • Functional cookies (optional)
  • Essential cookies (non-optional)

We do not use any cookies for marketing or targeting purposes.

Analytics cookies

These measure your website use and enable us to make improvements.

Functional cookies

These are not necessary to make our site work but make it easier to use the site by remembering your preferences.

Essential cookies

These are necessary to make our site work. You can disable them by changing your browser preferences. However, you should be aware that doing so will mean some parts of the website will stop working for you.

Third party cookies

These are cookies set by a website other than nationalarchives.gov.uk. They are set when you click on a third party link such as YouTube, Twitter and LiveChat. You cannot set your preferences for these on our site, but you can block them directly from your browser.

UK Government Web Archive

These cookies are necessary for the functioning of the UK Government Web Archive.

Due to the unique nature of web archiving, other certain essential cookies are required in order to accurately play back the content of websites as they were when they were archived. For example, when accessing the www.gov.uk archive some cookies from GOV.UK may be saved to your browser.

Online shop

These cookies are necessary for the functioning of the online shop.

Online shop reporting and analytics

Visit www.shopify.ca/legal/cookies for more information.

YouTube

We embed videos from our official YouTube channel using YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode. This mode may set cookies on your computer once you click on the YouTube video player, but YouTube will not store personally-identifiable cookie information for playbacks of embedded videos using the privacy-enhanced mode.

Read more at YouTube’s embedding videos information page.

Cookie name What it does/typical content Duration
Visitor_info1_live This attempts to estimate a user’s bandwidth on web pages with integrated YouTube videos. 6 months
YSC This registers a unique ID to remember a user’s actions. Expires at the end of the session
Secure3PSIDCC This is necessary for the use of website options and services. Expires at the end of the session
PREF This remembers a user’s preferred page configuration and playback preferences. 8 months
CGIC This improves search results with auto complete. 6 months
yt-remote-cast-installed

yt-remote-fast-check-period

yt-remote-session-app

yt-remote-session-name

This stores the user’s video player preferences when using embedded YouTube video.

When the YouTube embed loads on the page, a unique device identifier will be stored in your web browser’s local storage.

Expires at the end of the session
yt-remote-connected-devices

yt-remote-device-id

This stores the user’s video player preferences when using embedded YouTube video.

When the YouTube embed loads on the page, a unique device identifier will be stored in your web browser’s local storage.

Persistent

 

Workday, Job application website

Cookie name What it does/typical content Duration
PLAY_LANG To send the language of the user’s browser for session consistency. Expires at the end of the session
PLAY_SESSION To identify the session on subsequent requests. Expires at the end of the session
timezoneOffset To handle requests and detect requests that have timed out based on a common time-zone. Expires at the end of the session
WorkdayLB_UICLIENT To maintain requests from a single user on the same server for that feature to ensure consistency of experience. Expires at the end of the session
WorkdayLB_SAS To maintain requests from a single user on the same server for that feature to ensure consistency of experience. Expires at the end of the session
wday_vps_cookie To maintain requests from a single user on the same server for that feature to ensure consistency of experience. Expires at the end of the session
enablePrivacyTracking To capture and respect the user’s selection regarding acceptance of decline of non strictly necessary cookies. Expires at the end of the session

AddThis

These cookies are set if you use the AddThis tools on the blog pages to share content via social media.

Cookie name What it does/typical content Duration
_atuvc This (communication and marketing) cookie is associated with the AddThis social sharing widget; it stores an updated page share count. 1 year
_atuvs This (communication and marketing) cookie is associated with the AddThis social sharing widget; it serves a similar purpose to other cookies set by the service. 1 month
sshs This cookie stores and tracks visits across websites. 13 months
ssc This cookie stores and tracks visits across websites. 13 months
notice_gdpr_pref This is set by AddThis to record users’ preferences. 13 months
notice_preferences This is set by AddThis to record users’ preferences. 13 months
uvc This cookie stores and tracks visits across websites. 13 months
loc This is used to store location data for marketing and tracking. 13 months
UID This cookie is set to store a unique user ID for analytics. 1 year

Other cookies

The following cookies are currently set but not monitored and will be removed.

Cookie name What it does/typical content Duration
ACOOKIE This cookie is set by Webtrends and acts as a user session identifier for analytics data. 1 year
WT_FPC This is a Webtrends tracking cookie. 2 years
WEBTRENDS_ID This cookie set by Webtrends analytics service and is used to track and report on visitor behaviour on a site for performance improvement. 2 years