The Australian Web Archive (AWA) is a publicly available online database of archived Australian websites, hosted by the National Library of Australia (NLA) on its Trove platform, an online library database aggregator.
[6] In 2005, the NLA started archiving annual snapshots of the entire Australian web domain (URLs with the suffix.
[10] Australian Government websites are Commonwealth records, and are therefore publications to be managed in accordance with the Archives Act 1983.
There is a huge amount of publishing by the government, but many challenges to overcome trying to preserve content, such as its sudden disappearance.
[11] As of early 2015, the AGWA included content dating from 2005, which amounted to about 144 million files occupying 15 terabytes.
The collection archived in the AWA is "relevant to the cultural, social, political, research and commercial life and activities of Australia and Australians".
It collects web material via both scheduled archiving of selected websites and publications as well as some ad hoc harvesting relating to significant events.
The data remains on the Library servers, although a move to the cloud is envisaged in the future, as content grows.