MAGIC Website to Close by April 2011

[BAJR]

Tom Watson (West Bromwich East, Labour)
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what the URL is of each website managed by (a) her Department and (b) each non-departmental public body and agency for which her Department is responsible.

• Hansard source (Citation: HC Deb, 21 June 2010, c27W)
  

Richard Benyon (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Natural Environment and Fisheries), Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Newbury, Conservative)
DEFRA, including our non departmental public bodies and agencies, currently manages 82 websites. The URL for each is set out in the following table. As part of the Transformational Government Website Rationalisation process, we anticipate that around 57 of these will close by April 2011.


and one of these websites to close??



MAGIC... a very very useful one


http://www.magic.gov.uk


MAGIC was the first web-based interactive map service to bring together environmental information from across government. Partnership working has ensured that MAGIC has provided a sustained operational service to an extensive and diverse range of users far exceeding its original objectives and expectations of stakeholders.
This includes landscape data and scheduled monument data





see the rest here:
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=...peaker%3A1

[Dinosaur]

That's a bit of a nightmare! :face-crying:

[Dinosaur]

Just discussed it with the management, and we don't get the cost-saving, since they'll now be bombarded with queries from people still needing all the same information, which probably means it'll be costing them more overall?

[Dirty Boy]

Gah! No way! It's actually useful!
Shocking:face-rain:

[BAJR]

That's what a lot of people are thinking... imagine that... govt website that is useful...

er... lets ditch it!

However... latest news in is that

MAGIC - will not be closing but it may form part of the Defra website

the bit I don't like is the 'may'

BUT it is a step in the right direction . It seems that Defra have interpreted changes as closures rather than changes as changes.

:face-approve:

and breathe!

I have added an RSS feed from TheyWorkforYou website linked to archaeology and Heritage.. so every time this comes up in Parliament we will be notified... I have put it into the News section of the forum... but I can make it appear here if people would prefer

[chrysalis]

The MAGIC partnership remains committed to maintaining the MAGIC service. We do anticipate that the MAGIC website will be closed in due course but that the MAGIC service will continue to be provided from within the Defra website. We can?t at this stage rule out the possibility of further changes but we will as always keep the user community informed.

Andrea Ryder
MAGIC Service Manager
Natural England


BTW I'm not Andrea, just forwarding what we have been told officially and who told us...