The National Archives will start copying and making available online all central-government website content from November.
The organisation will expand its existing arrangement with the not-for-profit European Archive in Paris, so it will take copies of the content from 1,800 central-government websites approximately three times a year.
The European Archive already copies 50 or 60 UK government sites, which are freely available. This will be expanded from November, with the results available in the New Year.
David Thomas, the chief information officer of the National Archives, said the main reason for the expansion is to preserve documents posted online. "This should ensure much better survival of documents you see," he told GC News, adding that it is particularly valuable to copy websites just before their subject matter is moved to Directgov as part of the government's web-rationalisation programme.
Thomas said the National Archives will remove documents from the online system following a specific request from the originating organisation, unless it was for a trivial reason. He added that some content-management systems routinely delete documents after a certain period, such as 12 months, but these will be retained in the online archive.
The National Archives has two other projects in this area. Last week, it announced the completion of Seamless Flow, which has developed tools and processes to automate government departments. Thomas said this will be used for between one percent and 10 percent of documents, those with long term research value.
The Digital Continuity project will help departments maintain their own documents in a readable form, for material that needs to be available years or decades after it is first created. Thomas said the organisation is looking for a private sector partner, and will start a tender process by the end of this year with plans to complete it by the end of 2009. This might involve a full managed service, provision of tools or what Thomas called "a laundry service", able to take documents and convert them.
"We think we are starting at the right time," Thomas said of the work to preserve electronic documents. "If we'd left it much longer, material would have been permanently lost." Japan has lost large numbers of electronic pension records through a lack of preservation work, he said.
Read this
Feature: Defending against the digital dark age
National Archives chief information officer David Thomas is tasked with ensuring government documents and websites survive for future generations...
There was a particular risk in the three-dimensional models created for public enquiries, he added, but the National Archives has already preserved the model used in the enquiry into the sinking of The Marchioness on the Thames in 1989, and carried out preliminary work on the yet to be completed Bloody Sunday enquiry in Northern Ireland.
Thomas added that his organisation is working on how footage from surveillance cameras can be preserved in standard forms: despite its increasing use in trials, it uses a wide variety of formats, and may be required for retrials or appeals.
It is also investigating how to authenticate electronic documents it receives: "It's very easy in the paper world — you put it in a box," said Thomas, but this is not the case for digital material. "I think it's one of the big issues we need to investigate," he said.
