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 VI. Projects for Preservation of and Access to Digital Records of Parliamentary Documents

A. Digital Preservation at the British Library

As noted above, the Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013 requires nonprint work such as websites and electronic publications to be subject to legal deposit. This creates an archive of non-print work. The UK uses web crawling software to collect websites for the UK Web Archive, utilizing a seed list of domain addresses that are programmed into the software. This software sends requests to target websites, which respond automatically and deliver copies of the pages or files the software has requested. Websites and materials harvested by the software are preserved in the legal deposit libraries’ web archive. Web archiving of the Scottish Parliament and of the Welsh Assembly are undertaken by the National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Wales. The UK Web Archive is separate from the UK Government Web Archive (UKGWA), discussed below.

B. Digital Preservation at the National Archives

The National Archives maintains the UKGWA, and states that it is “one of the largest and most heavily used web archives in the world, containing over three billion URLs and frequently receiving more than ten million page views each month.” Part of the duties of the National Archive is to preserve the all web content owned by the central government, in all its forms, where current technology permits. The National Archives has stated that it intends “to capture datasets published on government websites into the UKGWA where the publication format and data contained within it is amenable.” In 2008, the National Archives expanded the scope of the UKGWA and created persistent links that allow users to access material that has been removed from its original location. The UKGWA is provided under contract to the National Archives by a non-profit organization known as the Internet Memory Foundation. From 2016, public bodies have been obligated to transfer born-digital records, meaning those that were created originally in digital form, rather than analog materials that have been subsequently The Law Library of Congress