Technical limitations, missing content

Users of the NRS Web Archive should bear in mind that some parts of selected websites may not be available in the web archive, for technical and/or legal reasons.

Firstly, we only capture web content which is freely available in the public domain. This therefore rules out:

• content behind user registration portals
• content behind firewalls
• content which requires a password to view
• content which is known to contain personal or sensitive information

In some cases, NRS must omit pieces of content from capture to respect this scope – see our Selection Policy (213 KB PDF) for more details. We will not capture content which is identified by website owners as containing personal information as defined by GDPR. External links to websites beyond the selected website will generally not be captured.

Secondly, from a technical angle, websites  -particularly those which have dynamic and interoperable features- can be difficult to archive fully . As result, users may find that when viewing archived snapshots certain features are missing or do not work, including:

• Search and filtering functionality of the original website
• Interactive maps
• Certain types of drop-down menu
• Streamed audio visual content such as YouTube and Vimeo videos
• Streamed social media content such as Twitter and Facebook feeds
• Complex Javascript and http POST functionality

To mitigate these technical challenges, NRS dedicates resource to quality assure archived snapshots to a high standard, so that they are as complete as possible. Refer to our Service Model (298 KB PDF) for more details.

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