The UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC) is a consortium of six leading UK institutions working collaboratively on a pilot operation archiving selected UK websites. UKWAC consists of the British Library, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the National Archives (UK), the National Library of Wales, the National Library of Scotland, and the Wellcome Library.
Consortium members started to archive selected websites in 2005 using PANDAS software, developed by the National Library of Australia(once appropriate permissions have been obtained from website owners) relevant to their interests. For example, the Wellcome Library focusses on collecting medical sites, whilst the National Library of Wales collects sites that reflect life in contemporary Wales. The British Library has a broad policy to collect sites of cultural, historical and political importance to the UK.
Once sites have been archived, catalogued and checked for completeness, they are made freely accessible through the UK Web Archive website. Users are able to search the archive by keyword or URL, or browse using broad subject headings.
Within the Archive there are Special Collections of archived sites grouped as representative of a particular event, or topic.
The Consortium itself was wound up in 2010, and the role of UKWAC as a focus for web archiving in the UK has been absorbed by the Digital Preservation Coalition as its Web Archiving and Preservation Task Force. The work of selective archiving continues, and the results are publicly available in the UK Web Archive, and in the public archives of the Consortium's former members.
As of December 2010 the UK Web Archive contains about 8,000 titles - and about 32,000 instances of these titles (6-monthly snapshots of each web site for which permission to archive was granted).