Web Archive
The UK Parliament Web Archive allows you to explore what information Parliament has published online, as well as how, when and where they published it.
What is the UK Parliament Web Archive?
The UK Parliament Web Archive is a collection of ‘snapshots’ capturing the content of the websites and social media accounts of Parliament, at various points, over time. Each snapshot reflects what the website or account looked like on the day it was taken.
The first snapshot was taken in July 2009, and we currently take three snapshots per year. This ensures that we have a record of the changing information and style of Parliament’s websites and social media.
As Parliament’s web presence develops over time, inevitably some websites will either be closed or content will be moved to other websites. Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web to ensure that this information is preserved for future researchers and the public.
By capturing regular snapshots of content, we can provide access to information that may be taken down from the live web so that users may be able to access data that once existed online, but no longer does. It also means we can track the changes over time in how Parliament interacts with people online, and this provides a fascinating glimpse into the recent past.
Limitations to what can be captured
External links (ie. links to non-parliamentary websites), will not be captured, since they fall outside of the scope of the collection. Clicking on external URLs from an archived snapshot will lead to an error message.
Native website search functionality will not be in use in archived snapshots. Use advanced search if you are looking for a specific phrase or document.
Other content which is dynamically generated (ie. content that is generated at the moment a user requests a page and changes based on the behaviour, preferences, and interests of that user), is unlikely to be captured. This is because it is not possible for the web harvesting tools to capture and render this type of functionality.
Other web archive collections
There are many other organisations both nationally and internationally, who are carrying out web archiving, including:
British Library’s UK Web Archive
National Archives UK Government Web Archive
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine
Want to know more?
We welcome feedback on the UK Parliament Web Archive. Please email us at digitalpreservation@parliament.uk