Labour's 13 years of government recorded online by National Archives

Labour's 13 years of power – including the last days of the Brown government – have been preserved online for posterity by the National Archives. The contents of websites run by Whitehall departments and hundreds of quangos have been saved and made available to contemporary historians and nostalgic browsers. More than one billion web pages are now stored on the National Archives site , displaying the explosion in digital communication since Labour came to power in 1997. During the final month of the last government and in the immediate aftermath of the creation of the Cameron/Clegg coalition, the archives carried out additional web trawls to capture the electoral battle. The material has already been in the public domain, but the readily accessible library of politicians' speeches, press notices, e-petitions and policy documents will be an invaluable resource for future generations. The announcement by the National Archives at Kew, west London, coincides with the decision by the incoming administration to clear its websites of suddenly outdated information. The Department of Health website, for example, now states: "[This] website is currently being updated to reflect the change in government. Some information published before 11 May 2010 has been removed, but can still be accessed through the National Archives website." The election trawls – aimed at providing historical snapshots of political and administrative change – were carried out four weeks and one week before 6 May and one week afterwards. "[We] started archiving websites in 2003 and now trawl more than 1,500 government websites three times a year, capturing and preserving their contents for the digital archive of the future," a National Archives spokesman explained. "This year, for the first time, the wealth of online government information circulated in the weeks leading up to and immediately after the general election has been systematically documented. "Key government websites, including the No 10 site, before and after the election, were archived to ensure nothing was lost as a result of a change of government." Among pages visible are statements announcing the decision to give responsibility to the Bank of England for setting interest rates in May 1997 and Tony Blair's post 9/11 war against terrorism . Gordon Brown's podcasts can be replayed, enabling internet explorers to relive the sounds of a period in which the prime minister had not yet experienced defeat and visit an upbeat Ed Balls promising "world-class education" to the young. David Thomas of the National Archives said: "We are the only government archive in the world regularly capturing and preserving government websites. The ephemeral nature of websites means there's a risk that important information could be lost without a comprehensive web archiving programme."