We're very shortly to upgrade our deployment of the Open Source Wayback Machine, the software made openly available by the Internet Archive to enable browsing of timed snapshots of an archived site. (See it in action in the UK Web Archive.) We're deploying a new version made available by the Internet Archive earlier this year.

Users will see immediately some enhancements. The banner at the top now will include more information about the number of instances of each site that are available, and an easier way of navigating between them. The information will be available in Welsh, in recognition of the remit of the archive for the whole of the UK; and there's also a handy Help link. For now, however, it will no longer be possible to minimise the banner and then reveal it again; it will be necessary to reload the page to see the banner once minimised.

Behind the scenes, the new version reads directly from our Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) which is more cost-effective, simpler to administer, more robust, and easier to scale up to cater for growing levels of usage.