Why Archive the Web?
The Internet has enabled an unprecedented era of knowledge sharing, creativity, innovation, and connection. It has also created new challenges for institutions whose mission it is to document and preserve contemporary knowledge and culture.
Many things that memory institutions collect, like scholarly publications, campaign materials, works of art, government documents, correspondence, and news, are now only available on the Web. Web pages are increasingly dynamic, they are constantly changing. To make sure this content survives for the next generation, it must be captured in real-time.
Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web, preserving the collections in an archival format, and then serving the archives for access and use.
To learn more about web archiving, explore our:
- About Archiving gives an overview of how the process of web archiving works
- Tools & Software developed and used by IIPC members to archive and provide access to historic web materials
- Collection Development Policies
- Case Studies on numerous use cases for archiving the web
- Video spotlights highlighting the value of web archives to researchers and curators
- Reports & Presentations from members and working groups on all aspects of web archiving
- Bibliography that provides a comprehensive index of scholarly and community resources about web archiving
- Legal Issues which determine the different regimes that govern how the web is archived and how archives are accessed
- Frequently Asked Questions about web archiving and the IIPC
- Training materials and video case studies
Information about web archiving and web archives in Catalan, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, German (DNB, ONB, Swiss NL), French (BAC-LAC, BANQ, BnF, BnL, INA, Swiss NL), Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (Spain, Chile), Swedish and Welsh.