How to set up an IAR
Guidance for government departments
Creating your IAR webpage
An essential step to including your IAR records on inforoute (on the OPSI website) is the hosting of your records on a web page. Hosting the records on a page under your control allows you to manage your records: update, add and remove, without reference to OPSI. All we need know is the location (URL) of the web page and we will routinely visit that page to download (spider) your records so that they can be included in inforoute.
Typically, this IAR web page on your site does not need to be linked to the rest of the site (orphan page) as only our search system visits them. When creating the page your web site colleagues should be aware of the following essential measures if we are to be able to access your records:
- a URL must be supplied to OPSI that details the exact path to the menu page for those records, i.e. http://www.websitename.gov.uk/iar/index.html A web server "directory listing" page is also acceptable
- the menu page or directory listing must contain hyperlinks to the IAR records
- all IAR records must have a .txt extension. It is also recommended that all filenames have no spaces
Obtaining your department IAR number
In each IAR record there is a field called ’IARN’. This is a unique number assigned to each government department that enables records to be easily identified as pertaining to the same department. Check existing records on inforoute to verify a department’s IAR number or alrternatively contact OPSI to obtain an IARN if you are a department creating an IAR for the first time.
Notifying OPSI of a new IAR or a relocated IAR
Once a government department has created an area on their website for their records, OPSI needs to be informed of the URL so that inforoute can download the records. We also need to know if a department’s IAR webpage has been moved so that we can continue to crawl the correct location and find the IAR files. Let us know by emailing inforoute@opsi.gsi.gov.uk.