UK web archive – now online

The first phase of the searchable archive of Web sites – selected for their scholarly, cultural and scientific value – is now available at http://www.webarchive.org.uk.

Developed by the UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC) the archive is aimed at the broad research community and marks the first systematic attempt to create an archive of social, historic and culturally significant web-based material from the UK domain.

Archiving web-based material is important, as much of this material is fragile, ephemeral and prone to sudden disappearance. Indeed, historically important information is often replaced as new knowledge becomes available or is simply removed altogether.

UKWAC – comprising The British Library, Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher and Further Education Councils (JISC), The National Archives, The National Library of Wales, the National Library of Scotland and the Wellcome Trust – are working together to address these issues and share responsibility for collecting web based material. Beyond this, one of the key objectives of this two-year project is to define sustainable methodologies and metrics for the long term preservation of this born-digital data.

The project has been archiving material for six months and the archive contains 299 titles and 1090 individual web sites. 84 GB of data has been collected, all of which can be searched and viewed through the online archive.

Each Consortium member selects and archives sites relevant to their subject interests. For example, the Wellcome is focusing its efforts on preserving the record of medicine on the web, whilst The National Archives has archived selected materials from six main clusters of government departments, such as the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (see: http://www.webarchive.org.uk/tep/10150.html).

The British Library has archived sites reflecting national culture and events of historical importance, such as a collection of sites relating to the recent Indian Ocean Tsunami, and the British response to it (see: http://www.webarchive.org.uk/col/c8050.html).
The Scottish and Welsh national libraries have collected a range material reflecting the culture and history of Scotland and Wales, (for example, see Wales on the Web at: http://www.webarchive.org.uk/tep/10506.html) whilst JISC has preserved a number of websites from leading-edge, innovative ICT projects in UK Higher and Further Education.

The UKWAC are using the PANDAS/Pandora web archiving software developed by the National Library of Australia as its archiving tool. The software has been modified for UKWAC-use in the UK by Magus Research Ltd, who host the service and provide the shared hardware and technical support.

The archive is available at: http://www.webarchive.org.uk

For further information:

• To contact UKWAC please use the contact form on the site http://info.webarchive.org.uk/contact.html

• PANDAS/Pandora web archiving at the National Library of Australia http://pandora.nla.gov.au/index.html

• Magus Research Ltd http://www.magus.co.uk/