The National Library of Norway
Organization Type: National Library
Country: Norway
IIPC Contact Email: iipc@nb.no
Founding member
Norsk nettarkiv (Web Archive Norway)
- Start date: 2001
- Archive interface language: Norwegian
- Access method: Keyword search
- Harvesting method: National domain, Event
The Act relating to the Legal deposit of generally available documents, which came into force in 1990, is the National Library’s foundation with regard to web harvesting. The National Library of Norway started harvesting the Norwegian top level domain (.no) on a yearly basis in 2001 using different harvesting approaches: selective, domain crawl and event harvesting. In 2008 the National Library had to stop full domain harvests since the Norwegian Data Inspectorate questioned the legal basis for this practice. From 2008 until now the National Library are harvesting between 500 – 2500 subdomains under .no, after informing the website owners in writing first. These subdomains have been harvested on a daily basis since 2011, using Heritrix. Access to the harvested web pages is not available.
A revised version of the Norwegian Act on Legal Deposit came into force 1st January 2016. The new law enables the NLN to do full domain harvests of the Norwegian top level domain (.no), as well as to collect websites outside the .no-domain that are either owned by Norwegian institutions or individuals, or adapted to Norwegian users. The revised law also makes it possible for the National Library to make the web archive available for research and documentation purposes. NLN currently works to establish a more up to date solution for the web harvesting activity, that are flexible and that scales to handle the full Norwegian top domain. The main tools for the harvesting and for giving access to the web archive will be Heritrix and OpenWayback. However, we aim for a solution that allows us to also use other methods for harvesting when appropriate.
Due to privacy protection, access to the Web Archive is restricted for the time being.