MirrorWeb Awarded Welsh Government Web and Social Archiving Contract

National Assembly for Wales flickr photo by Elliott Brown shared under a Creative Commons (BY - SA) licence.

We’re proud to announce that we have been awarded a three-year contract to preserve the digital heritage of the Welsh nation by archiving web and social media communications for the Welsh government.

The MirrorWeb team will archive the government’s web-published content in both English and Welsh on all websites of historic and national significance.

We will also undertake full capture and preservation of the government’s Twitter accounts, including @WelshGovernment, @LlywodraethCym and @FMWales.

Secure Cloud-Native Storage for Welsh digital history

The introduction of the MirrorWeb platform will modernise how the content is captured and stored, providing a reliable, comprehensive and intuitive search service of Wales’s digital history.

The project is currently in its early stages. We have received and transferred the Welsh Government’s current historical archive – amounting to 20TB of data – seamlessly and cost-efficiently to the cloud.

The millions of web pages were harvested over the last three years, but have now been captured and indexed by our proprietary platform in a matter of hours.

Future-proof, and Advanced Search Functionality

We are now performing crawls of the sites and social media channels, harvesting and preserving the up-to-date data and publishing it using our a  public portal with search functionality.

Philip Clegg, chief technical officer at MirrorWeb, said:

“We’re proud to be preserving a future-proof digital record of the Welsh Government’s online activity. Our website and social media archiving and monitoring platform is built on the cloud and provides the essential infrastructure and capacity to meet the size and complexity of the Welsh Government’s archive.”

Early indications suggest that the platform is already having a positive effect on resource for the Welsh government, with MirrorWeb CEO David Clee stating that: “Thanks to our advanced search functionality, our client has already experienced a 90% reduction in calls from researchers.”

MirrorWeb: Your Web and Social Media Archiving Partner

By partnering with MirrorWeb, you’ll be using a trusted and secure archiving service provider with extensive experience in understanding your requirements. Our solution provides a range of benefits, including:

• State-of-the-Art - offering support for web and social media data at scale, as well as indexing for search and big data initiatives.
• Cloud-Native - we offer near-unlimited capacity and scalability with complete control over data storage.
• ISO-Compliant - we are ISO9001 and ISO27001-certified and archive our data in the secure, date and time-stamped ISO28500 standard WARC file format.
• UK-Based - we offer UK-based support 24/7/365 and store all archives in local territories to meet data protection, compliance and regulatory requirements.
• User-Friendly - our best-in-class user portal puts users in control of their data, allowing them to control archiving frequency, search and replay content, and view reports and notifications.
• Cost-Competitive - we give full, uncapped access to the MirrorWeb portal at all times, leveraging Cloud economies of scale with no hidden seat fee, no setup and maintenance fees.