The National Archives, the official archive of the UK government, will pilot a web archiving model for local authorities to ensure that important online information is preserved for future generations.
Currently, The National Archives works in partnership with the Internet Memory Foundation (IMF) to archive central government websites, but its remit does not extend to cover all the local government or community websites which may be of interest to local record offices.
The pilot will run in seven local authority archives - covering more than 20 local authorities - where staff will be trained in how to develop a curated web archive for their area. They will be provided free support from The National Archives and the Internet Memory Foundation for the duration of the pilot.
Web archiving is the process of collecting websites and the information they contain from the World Wide Web and preserving them in an archive. The UK Government Web Archive, which is run by The National Archives, contains more than a billion pages of archived material from 2,000 central government websites dating back to 1997.
The pilot will be used as the basis for creating a template for procuring web archiving services and guidance on best practice to help archive services across the country develop their own web archives. The pilot will archive local authority websites as well as community or private websites which the archive services think may be of interest to future local historians.
The National Archives is also conducting an automated web crawl of local authority and NHS sites in the next two years to capture a wide variety of locally-held information, including datasets which are not currently preserved by data.gov.uk. The resulting captured data will complement the in-depth work of the pilot.
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