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The UK Web Archive is currently unavailable

Read our UK Web Archive blog for updates on access, information about other web archives, and where to find more information about what is in the UK Web Archive.

We are continuing to archive UK websites, and can add new websites to our acquisition process, ensuring that the UK Web Archive is updated and preserved. This is conducted under UK legal deposit law.

The British Library is continuing to experience disruption following a cyber-attack and are working hard to restore services. Disruption to certain services is expected to persist for some time.

If you have any questions about the UK Web Archive, or would like to nominate a website for crawling, please contact web-archivist@bl.uk.

View and search UK content from the web using the Legal Deposit Web Archive access tool available at the National Library of Wales.

Content which the UK's legal deposit libraries can harvest via the UK Web domain crawl includes millions of sites from the '.uk' domain and a great many from other UK-based domains.

Who has access?

Anyone who has an NLW reader’s ticket can use the web archive access tool from computers in the Library's Reading Room.

Please note: When a website or resource is being viewed via the tool, access is locked to one user within the system.

Where a website owner has granted permission to the Library, access is available to the public through the open Web Archive site.

Searching archived websites

Full text search is available for archived websites. A search tips tab provides a useful quick reference for search query syntax.

You can further refine your results by automatically indexed terms, e.g. domain name or format.

Conditions of use

Most of the websites in the Web Archive are subject to copyright.

You must read and accept the copyright and intellectual property conditions before you can use the web access tool. These conditions include advice on printing copies of archived web pages.

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