Big changes at the Scottish Parliament’s website have seen most pre-2011 content moved or archived. AS KEEN OBSERVERS of the Scottish Parliament website have noted, with the launch of the new Scottish Parliament website earlier this month, there have been recent, significant changes to the location of much of the debates, petitions, official reports, bills & legislation passed by Holyrood in the years since the parliament reconvened in 1999. Much of the content pre 2011 has now been archived, leaving ‘backlinks’ posted to it by news & media websites and online social media, dead or redirecting to the Parliament’s main page.
To clear up some of the confusion surrounding the relocation of entire sections of the Scottish Parliament’s website and questions to Diary of Injustice & journalists from those who have submitted petitions, material; other content over the years since 1999, a Scottish Parliament spokeswoman said today :“Our approach was to ensure that all key content has been retained from the old website. Our website plays a vital role in Parliament being open and accessible to the public - our home page receives around 100,000 hits each month so it is important that we keep pace with technology and people’s expectations of a decent quality website. The old website was last updated in 2004 and web technology has moved on significantly.”
A statement from the Scottish Parliament revealed some of the changes with the launch of their new website :
The new Scottish Parliament website went live on October 12th 2011 and we have tried as far as possible to ensure that all key Parliament content has been retained from the old site; Most content from 1999 is still available, although possibly not from the same place and we are aware that some links in documents, web pages, or pages that have been set as favourites by users will no longer work. This is unavoidable to some degree when sites have major overhauls and the structure is changed. To mitigate this we have put redirects in place to ensure that users do not get broken links and instead get redirected to the relevant channel home page, from which users can navigate to the content. Here is some information about how older Parliamentary Business content can now be found on the new site:
Official Reports – via OR search tool. This includes all Official Reports from 1999 onwards.
Business Bulletin – current session available
Committees – all previous committees can be accessed from http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/1702.aspx; Each committee has full membership details, all committee reports, and links to meeting papers and Official Reports.
Bills – all previous Bills can be accessed from http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/Bills/610.aspx
Minutes - current and previous session available at http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/15519.aspx (with links to minutes from 1999 onwards)
Motions, Questions and Answers – all available via search from 1999 onwards
Petitions – current petitions available at: http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/CurrentCommittees/29869.aspx
There is an archive for older content which has been agreed to not be migrated over to the new site at present and is not included in the search tools. This is available at http://archive.scottish.parliament.uk/.
Links to specific parts of this site have been added to the new site so that users do not have to find the archive site and navigate through. The search tool will pick up content from both the current and the archive site. This includes: Business Bulletins 1999-2011, Minutes 1999-2011, The Journal for Sessions 1 and 2, Other Committee material for Sessions 1, 2 and 3 (designed to include more ephemeral or background information).
Closed petitions are now located here : http://archive.scottish.parliament.uk/business/petitions/closed/index.htm although while the team are working to ensure all closed petitions are archived, not all appear to have been transferred to this link as of today.
While noting all links to previous bills & discussions relating to justice & law issues discussed on the Scottish Parliament’s website are now changed, readers can still view my coverage of these issues via the LABELS section on this blog, along with video footage of Parliamentary discussions at InjusticeTV. Holyrood.TV & BBC Democracy Live Scotland also carry video feeds of political discussions & other archived material.
9 comments:
..making it that more difficult to find out what happened before the SNP takeover!
That Holyrood website could do with a second relaunch if you ask me.How about giving debates petitions bills & legislation their own websites instead of having it all under the Committees?
Nothing short of a mess and it looks even more difficult to get through now than it was before and thats saying something!
Have the Scots Parliamentarians never heard of "Hansard"?
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmhansrd.htm
Wondered what was going on because I was searching for a petition and it had disappeared along with all the letters we put in
Anonymous said...
..making it that more difficult to find out what happened before the SNP takeover!
25 October 2011 21:18
OF COURSE
yeah getting rid of all the controversial stuff so no one finds it nice move fat Eck
Someone on the newsdesk was saying the same last week because they had noticed links on the paper's main site back to Holyrood were hitting a dead end.
The web site address which hosts the Westminster legislation content usually changes from time to time (usually between Governments) yet they manage to redirect the links.
For example opsi.gov.uk as it was under the former Labour Govt now converts to legislation.gov.uk in all search engines so nothing is really lost.
Is such a move beyond the capability of Holyrood ?
Yes convenient how its all been lost or rearranged so harder to find - I tried some google searches and they all came up with pdfs that fail to load and links that go back to their main page.Stupid!
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