Monday, 9 January 2012

TNA to close down Your Archives

The National Archives at Kew is closing down the ability for the public to edit contributions to the Your Archives wiki website at http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk from September of this year, and is allowing no new subscribers as of this month. The role of the site will be transferred as a new feature to be added to its Discovery Service, which will eventually replace the archive's online catalogue.

TNA's announcement at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news/659.htm states that this is because "users expect to see information relating to records in one place, whether the 'official' catalogue description or detail added by another user". However, only some of the material on Your Archives will be transferred to the Discovery site and the rest sent for "preservation on the government web archive - Your Archives' content will be accessible from the archive, but some functionality may not work".

So, err, its contents will still be accessible via two different sites, unless I've missed something!

Chris

2 comments:

  1. There's quite a lot of material on Your Archives that relates to material not held in The National Archives, and may link to external website. That's the kind of material that will go to the Government Web Archive.

    Things like the census street indexes and transcriptions of PCC wills will go into Discovery because they relate to specific records.

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  2. Thanks Audrey, a useful clarification

    Chris

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