User:Zosterae/ukgwa draft

=THIS IS A DRAFT OF A POSSIBLE PAGE FOR THE UKGWA=

The UK Government Web Archive
The UK Government Web Archive (UKGWA) is part of The National Archives (United Kingdom). The National Archives collects records from all UK government departments and bodies creating records defined as Public Records under the British Public Records Act. This includes on-line records, which are captured, preserved, and kept accessible by the UKGWA in conjunction with current service provider the Internet Memory Foundation.

Since the UKGWA began operation only in the mid 2000s, the oldest material in the Archive, which dates back to 1996, has been provided retrospectively by the Internet Archive. The UKGWA was a founding member of the UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC) and captured many websites through the consortium between 2004 and 2010.

Between 2004 and 2008 the UKGWA mainly held copies of websites created by departments of state and those of UK Public Inquiries. During 2007 Members of Parliament became aware of the increasing problem of link rot on UK government web sites. In particular many links from Hansard were found to have stopped working. The response was the Web Continuity programme, which provides automatic redirection to the UKGWA of links from UK Government web sites where the linked material has been retired. Web Continuity required UK Government website managers to work with the UKGWA to capture copies of any material about to be removed. As a result the UKGWA now captures almost the whole of the UK Government web estate. This became especially important during periods of government website closures, initially with the Directgov programme, and more recently with the convergence of UK government content onto the Gov.uk website.

UK government departments have increasingly used social media to communicate with the public, so that part of the online Public Record is now held on sites not directly managed by government departments. From 2014 the UKGWA has captured part of this: official tweets on Twitter and government videos released on Youtube.

The UKGWA is now one of the web archiving initiatives holding the largest amount of material fully open to the public, since the majority of UK public records are Crown Copyright and so are available under the Open Government License. However, restrictions to Crown Copyright material mean that, when it comes to social media archiving, the UKGWA can contain only the UK Government's side of the conversation with the public.