UK Government Web Archive captures official tweets and videos
8 May 2014 01:08 PM
From today The National
Archives will begin to archivetweets and You Tube
videos published by UK central government departments from their official
Twitter and YouTube social media platforms.
This marks the culmination of a
complex technical project to capture social media into the UK Government Web Archiveand permanently preserve it as the official
public record.
Part of the historic
record
The UK government social media
archive contains over 7,000 videos that date from 2006 to early 2014 and over
65,000 tweets from 2008 to September 2013. It covers some major events in
our recent history, including: The Queen's Diamond
Jubilee, the London 2012 Olympic
Games, Budget
announcements and theformation of the Coalition
government following the general election in 2010.
Clem
Brohier, Interim Chief Executive and Keeper, The National
Archives, commented: 'Social media now plays an important part in
government communications, with departments using Twitter to clarify policy and
You Tube to promote initiatives. So it was imperative for The National Archives
to develop systems to support social media archiving and for these formats to
be preserved as part of the official public record. This was no small task but
we rose to the challenge. It is an exciting step for archives and history; with
present and future generations being able to view tweets to understand events
in history, just like we do with historic telegrams
today.'
Expanding the web
archive
The National Archives worked
with the Internet Memory Foundation to develop tools to capture the
record in its original published context, preserving the content and making it
permanently accessible through the UK Government Web Archive.
Since 2003, The National
Archives has archived over three billion items that were published online by
the UK government including web pages, documents and interactive games -
and now with social media being added to the digital archive, this is set to
grow enormously.
We will continue to capture and
archive tweets and video feeds from UK central government departments on a
regular basis and develop the social media archive so that it is fully
integrated into the rest of the UK Government Web Archive.