Catalogue description GOV.UK and Associated Agencies and Bodies: Websites and Social Media

This division contains GOV.UK websites and social media channels, together with websites and social media channels of agencies and other bodies associated with GOV.UK

Websites and social media channels are archived regularly as part of The National Archives' collection policy. For information about the appraisal decisions informing the scheduling and selection of these websites and social media channels, please refer to Operational Selection Policy OSP 27: The selection of government websites.

The selected websites have been gathered (or crawled) from the Internet in a variety of ways, by various organisations including: The National Archives, MirrorWeb, the Internet Archive, the European Archive and the UK Web Archiving Consortium. They form part of the UK Government Web Archive, along with one-off gathers which are collected in response to topical issues or unusual circumstances (such as capturing the website of a body not regularly collected prior to it winding up), or as part of a themed collection. The frequency at which each website is gathered is scheduled; the frequencies vary and can be subject to change, especially where the functions of the body represented by the website alter. Some websites which were transferred directly to The National Archives from government departments rather than being harvested from the Internet can also be found in the UK Government Web Archive.

The selected social media channels have been harvested from the Internet directly from the application programming interface (API) provided by the platform owners, by the Internet Memory Foundation (to June 2017) and MirrorWeb (from July 2017 onwards) and delivered through a custom interface developed by MirrorWeb in partnership with The National Archives. They form the UK Government Social Media Archive.

The channels captured are hosted on three distinct platforms: YouTube which comprises video content, Twitter which comprises short text messages (known as tweets), images and video, and Flickr which comprises images, texts and videos. Metadata such as descriptions were also captured as part of the harvesting process and are replayed through the custom interface. Where tweets include links to UK government hosted web content, those links can be followed to an archived version of that resource held in the UK Government Web Archive. YouTube and Twitter channels were first captured in 2010. Flickr channels were first captured in January 2019. Prior to July 2017 Twitter Channels were generally captured once every six months and YouTube channels were captured once every eight months. From July 2017 all channels are checked regularly for updates. All new posts added since the previous check are captured and added to the archive.

Please see the UK Government Web Archive for more information.