In December 2023, the UK Parliament Web Archive moved to The National Archives (TNA). This move is part of the Digital Archives Relocation project, which is under the Archives Relocation Programme. It’s the first part of our digital collections to move to TNA, helping to future-proof Parliament's archives.
What is the Web Archive?
Since 2011, the Digital Preservation team has been saving the content of Parliament’s websites and social media accounts. This helps preserve Parliament’s changing online presence. They do this using a ‘seed list’ - a list of URLs that tell web crawlers where to go online.
Three times a year, the team takes a snapshot of selected websites and social media accounts. They also do special snapshots when important events happen, like the death of a monarch, to capture those moments.
What Has Changed?
Both Parliament and TNA used the same web archive service provider. Their contracts were ending in September 2023, so they decided to move the UK Parliament Web Archive to TNA’s account. Now, TNA handles the technical parts of the web archive. The look and feel of the archive remain the same, so users won’t notice any difference.
The project was a close collaboration between UK Parliament’s Digital Preservation Team and The National Archives’ Web Archive Team. As well as contract and financial changes, we defined areas of responsibility and what resources we need and how we work. Sharing knowledge about our web archive collection, and all the websites or ‘seeds’ within the Web Archive was an important piece of work which is still ongoing. Behind the scenes, we moved Parliament’s Web Archive data to TNA’s secure cloud storage and tested and launched the access portal webarchive.parliament.uk.
Benefits of the Move
Moving some aspects of running the Web Archive across to The National Archives means Parliament’s Digital Preservation Team can focus on finding and selecting Parliamentary websites and social media channels to archive and can work closely with colleagues across Parliament to build a fuller picture of Parliament’s online presence over the years.
It also strengthens collaboration with The National Archives (TNA), which already manages significant web archives including the UK Government Web Archive and the EU Exit Web Archive. Through closer collaboration, we can work together to ensure broader public access and promote a better understanding of how Government and Parliament work together.
Working Together
In January, TNA ran the first successful crawl, collaborating closely with us throughout the process. We've also conducted specialised 'ad hoc' crawls to prepare for upcoming events like the general election. Here's what TNA had to say about the move:
Sarah Dietz, Web Archive Service Owner, “The successful transition of the Parliament Web Archive operations to The National Archives Web Archiving Team is a significant milestone. This project, characterised by its open and collaborative approach, involved cooperation of web archivists, external suppliers, IT specialists and parliamentary staff. The first set of crawls for the Parliament collection have been run and published, demonstrating the effectiveness of this transition. Teamwork and shared expertise have been crucial.”
Annie Ward, Web Archivist, “From carrying out QA checks on our first crawls since the transition, this has been a great experience - it's been fascinating to learn more about Parliament's websites and observe some of the differences from our existing government collection, as well as finding areas of overlap and some familiar web archiving challenges!”
What’s Next?
The focus for the rest of the year is to streamline our ways of working with The National Archives, ensuring this partnership is beneficial for both teams. One aspect of this work is moving all the information needed to capture websites in the Web Archive, the ‘crawl data’, into TNA’s crawl management database. We’re also working to implement TNA’s Access Management system for our collections.
Want to Find Out More?
To explore the UK Parliament Web Archive visit webarchive.parliament.uk. Information about the UK Government Web Archive can be found here.
For questions about the project and programme, contact archivesrelocation@parliament.uk
For questions about digital preservation and web archiving at Parliament, contact digitalpreservation@parliament.uk
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