Surrey Heritage has taken part in a pilot project led by The National Archives to preserve Surrey websites for the future, capturing the digital history of local communities. During the pilot we worked with the National Archives and their technical partner, the Internet Memory Foundation. We learnt about the processes and technical challenges of website archiving, and selected three websites for archiving.
The sites chosen were Hambledon Village, Painshill Park and Surrey Wildlife Trust. Permission was obtained from the owners of the sites for the archiving to take place, and the 'crawl' of the sites that captured the data, was carried out early in 2012. Quality assurance was carried out on the results of the crawl and the websites have now been archived and can be viewed on the Internet Memory Foundation website. Not every aspect of a website can always be archived, so some content, such as Flash animations, may be missing. For technical reasons connected with the pilot the websites have been displayed as part of the National Archives own web archive.
We are now working with other pilot members on defining a specification for a local web archiving service to meet the needs of the wider archives community. We hope to be able to develop the lessons learned from the pilot project to allow us to archive more websites in the future.
