web archiving | The National Archives blog

Posts tagged 'web archiving'

Fri Jun

2012

Helping hedgehogs to cross the road – games in the UK Government Web Archive

Posted by Claire Newing in Technology and innovation

When I tell people that I work at The National Archives they tend to automatically assume that I work with dusty paper records. It is sometimes quite a struggle to explain that I deal with archiving websites and rarely enter the repositories they have seen featured in TV history programmes. Other posts in this blog have explained that The National Archives preserves a diverse range of records which are not all paper based. We hold such things as a glove, a leather case and of course a wide range of digital records including a perhaps surprising number of video games.

My earlier post noted that UK Government began using the internet to communicate with citizens in the mid 1990s. As web technology developed and more people began to use the internet, government organisations started to develop different types of content aimed at particular sections of the population. This included the development of several video games which were hosted on government websites. In some cases we have been able to capture the games and add them to the web archive.

Many of these games were aimed at children, such as the games on the Hedgehog family website, which we archived in November 2008. The Hedgehog family was a Department of Transport initiative which aimed to educate children about road safety. A variety of different types of media were used. The Hedgehog family was replaced by a new initiative called Tales of the Road in November 2008 and the website was removed from the live web. We are pleased that this example of how government used technology to communicate with children has been captured for long term preservation.

The Hedgehog Family website - archived November 2008

Tue May

2012

Spiders on the web: Archiving UK Government websites

Posted by Tom Storrar in Technology and innovation

The UK Government Web Archive is one of the world’s largest and most used. Not only do we take regular snapshots of websites to guard against contemporary government information being permanently lost, we also use the collection to help our colleagues across government in their efforts to keep historical information truly accessible through the principle of Web Continuity.

Central to this is having an effective and consistent method for capturing this content.

Wed Apr

2012

Web Continuity success

Posted by Amanda Spencer in Technology and innovation

I have enjoyed reading the recent blogs of my colleagues on the subject of the UK Government Web Archive and its evolution since the early days of UK Government on the web. I’d like to continue to the theme of evolution and take a look back at how far we’ve come in recent years.

Mon Mar

2012

A light bulb moment – and a lost government ‘first’ is found

Posted by Linda Stewart in Technology and innovation

The previous blog from the UK Government Web Archive, brought to you by my colleague Claire Newing, took you back to the nostalgic 1990s. I’ll be mostly continuing Claire’s story, but, apart from a slight digression to 1858, looking at a more recent era of government technology.

In the early days of websites some folk were never wholly convinced of the value of archiving publications that could be obtained from elsewhere. Archivists like to deal in stable, certain things called records; you know where you are with a nicely labelled and dated government file, or even a fragment of medieval parchment, unchanged for centuries. Hence a whole debate went on around whether or not a website was a record; maybe it was a medium for documents that were records – or maybe it wasn’t. Happily The National Archives didn’t wait for the outcome; we went ahead and captured government websites anyway. Meanwhile, as the record debate raged, a further complication appeared: the web became an interactive medium with technologies bundled together as Web 2.0: blogs, wikis, crowd sourcing – web users could interact with the content, adding their own thoughts to pristine web pages. In the event, Web 2.0 brought with it a demonstration of the long term value of archiving website material, although it didn’t seem like it at the time.

If a website was a government record, well, here were people, members of the public from anywhere on the planet, actually changing that record. And anyway, how could something as informal as a blog be a record?

Nonetheless, in a small way at first, government began to blog. It seems commonplace now, but it was only five or six years back that the first Ministerial blog was posted by David Miliband as Minister of Communities and Local Government at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

It was long thought that the ODPM blog was lost to posterity, as David Miliband was shortly afterwards posted to Defra, taking his blog with him. But researching in the UK Government Web Archive for today’s post, I found that a Defra crawl has picked up the links back to ODPM, and by clicking on the ‘posts by category ’ tabs it looks as if all, or nearly all, of the lost first ministerial blog is there.

Fri Mar

2012

Open data and archiving datasets

Posted by Simon Demissie in Technology and innovation

Considering the word ‘digital’ makes up one third of my job title, you might consider it an oversight to have not used it once in my last blog entry. That may be an indication of variety in work – or perhaps forgetfulness – but I will make up for that today when I consider the union and mutually-beneficial relationship between open data and the archiving of datasets. dataTube

A colleague recently asked me what a dataset is. This is not necessarily as simple a question as it may appear: I side-stepped. I think the answer really lies in the term ‘structured data’; namely that the text of an email could not necessarily be termed a dataset, but a table in a PDF, a CSV (Comma-Separated Values) file, or an XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) file could. Also, a dataset can be analysed quantitatively, and is not a collection of different electronic files, like a database. However, the discussion rages and the terminology is so uncertain that the Government has even consulted on the word itself.

Mon Mar

2012

Textured backgrounds, animated clipart and many, many colours – UK Central Government websites in the late 1990s

Posted by Claire Newing in Managing information, Technology and innovation

In this post I plan to take you on a trip back through history to a time when Tony Blair had been Prime Minister for just six months, Gordon Brown was Chancellor of the Exchequer and ‘The Teletubbies say “Eh-Oh”‘ was at the top of the UK singles chart. Yes, I am describing the year 1997. I’m aware that 1997 is not long ago in relation to some of the records held at The National Archives, but as my colleague Mark Merifield explained in his recent post, the last few decades have seen drastic changes in the way that public records are produced. A majority of records are now digital and many are made available through the internet.

I work as part of the Web Continuity Team and we are responsible for archiving the websites of UK Central Government departments. The first departmental websites were launched in the mid-1990s just as general use of the internet began to take off. As government use of the internet increased, The National Archives recognised that valuable information was at risk of being lost and in 2003 we began a programme of archiving websites. We worked with the Internet Archive, a US based non-profit organisation which had started archiving websites from around the world as early as 1996. Fortunately for us the Internet Archive had archived several early UK Central Government websites. Some of these early archived versions are now available through the UK Government Web Archive.

One of my favourite examples is this instance of the HM Treasury website which was archived in December 1997.

Viewing the earliest captures in the archive is like a step down memory lane for me. I’m transported back to the dark days of dial up and having to wait through 10 minutes of strange noises while the modem dialled several phone numbers before finally connecting to the web. Then after all that having to disconnect a few minutes later because someone else in the house needed to use the phone!