The National Archives of Australia's "Discovering Anzacs" website has been decommissioned

Question

Some of you will remember the National Archives of Australia's "Discovering Anzacs" website. It ceased working without notice several weeks back and I'd assumed it was undergoing a technology refresh (their RecordSearch system was up & down for weeks).

I notice today that there was a Press Release dated 24 Feb 2023 saying it was gone for good "with a view to developing another offering" at some time in the future.

https://www.naa.gov.au/about-us/media-and-publications/media-releases/discovering-anzacs-website-decommissioned-making-way-innovative-new-digital-experiences

Anyone who used links to the website records will have some work to do.

(The site also allowed user-submitted content, such as photos of soldiers - hopefully they haven't been binned as well).

Comments

As of last week there were 1255 profiles linking to the site:

https://wikitree.sdms.si/default.htm?report=srch1&Query=domain%3Ddiscoveringanzacs_naa_gov_au&MaxProfiles=10000

The news release mentions an archive:

https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20221128071851/http://discoveringanzacs.naa.gov.au/

I wonder if EditBot could change all the links to point to that.

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I'm not sure that anything beyond the home page has been archived.  The search link doesn't appear to work on the archived home page, unless one accidentally replicates a search that has coincidentally been archived.

Thankfully, I have only one link to the "decommissioned" website in my personal database, but I can't find the archived version of

https://discoveringanzacs.naa.gov.au/browse/records/121148

which I expected to be at

https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/*/https://discoveringanzacs.naa.gov.au/browse/records/121148

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Paddy - if it was an Australian, you should be able to replace the link using the NAA's RecordSearch site. For NZ, it will be on the NZ Archives site. https://www.archives.govt.nz/research-guidance/research-guides/war-records/world-war-one-1914-1918?fbclid=IwAR0CsT4uhM3t2ScbQVOqxxP20XBfo9dpKs6U7-LgvWwUuP5VikQOdTINmJ8 

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Jim - no hope of EditBot making the changes - the NAA's RecordSearch Item ID is different to the Discovering Anzacs number, and any NZ service personnel aren't on RecordSearch. It will be a manual slog of find & replace.

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Thanks, Mark. I don't think this is the first time the Australian WWI records have been moved around on the web.  I have bookmarked half a dozen different interfaces over the years and never know which one to use!

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For New Zealand, I suggest visiting https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/war-memorial/online-cenotaph ; following the links from there, I have been able to find information on that web site, for some relatives, and, following links from that web site, to the NZ archives, have been able to view and download copies of their military service files (free of charge).

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Some of the discoveringanzacs URLs are on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://discoveringanzacs.naa.gov.au*

It does seem pretty poor form that the NAA haven't managed to actually archive one of their own websites!

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Sam Wilson - the Australian government agency with responsibility for archiving website is the National Library, I guess because they are a form of publication. But they (and others) can only capture static pages, not underlying database content.