UK GOVERNMENT WEB ARCHIVE & EU EXIT WEB ARCHIVE

The National Archives' current contract for managing and developing the UK Government Web Archive and the EU Exit Web Archive is due to expire at the end of August, 2023. As such, we invite interested parties to submit bids for a replacement contract to commence in September, 2023. The initial contract period will be 43 months, with three optional extension periods of up to 12 months each.

UK Government Web Archive (UKGWA)

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/webarchive/

The Keeper of Public Records and Chief Executive of The National Archives (TNA), is appointed by the Secretary of State for DCMS under the Public Record Act 1958. The Keeper has a broad duty to take all practicable steps for the preservation of public records and also to provide reasonable facilities for the public to inspect and access public records.

Over the last 25 years an important part of the public record has been published on the web. TNA delivers a service to capture these records and make them available to the public. The operating model involves an in-house team alongside a contract for the provision of web archiving services. The contracted services involve crawling government websites, storing the contents in the UKGWA and making the contents available to the public. These records also provide valuable contextual information for other records when they are eventually made available by TNA.

EU Exit Web Archive (EEWA)

https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/eu-exit/

The European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, Schedule 5, created a duty on the King's Printer (also the Keeper and Chief Executive of TNA) to publish certain documents that were originally adopted as EU legislation, which have been retained and incorporated into UK domestic law. There is also a power to publish other documents, including the decisions of the European Court of Justice. To fulfil this duty, the EEWA serves as a comprehensive archive of EU Law, as it stood at Exit Day and later on Implementation Period Day, as a permanent record of the law at those Completion points.

For both web archives, the contractor will provide crawling services to harvest content from websites, replay services so users can access the archived content, search services, access management services, and hosting management services (the service will be hosted in TNA's AWS account but managed by the supplier).

ITT documents are available on request, from procurement@nationalarchives.gov.uk