JISC

JISC-funded projects generate significant amounts of web material, some of which constitutes a unique record of the activities undertaken by project staff and their outputs. Whilst these projects are usually asked to commit to keeping their web output available for up to 3 years after the project has finished, their long-term availability is not usually guaranteed. The Archiving JISC Websites initiative is an ongoing measure to ensure that all of this material is safely harvested and preserved for future reference. It contributes to a larger archive that is made accessible via the catalogue of the UK Web Archiving Consortium, a resource that allows researchers a single point of access to the web archives of a number of different prominent UK organisations.

The technical infrastructure that underpins the web archiving processes (which are carried out by the University of London Computer Centre on behalf of JISC) are based on a British Library provided subscription service, BL-WAS (British Library - Web Archiving Service). The open Source Web Curation Tool (WCT) is used to manage the selective web harvesting process, whilst the actual material is downloaded using the Heretrix crawler tool.