The Royal Library of Belgium
Organization Type: National Library
Country: Belgium
IIPC Contact Email: webarchive@kbr.be
www.kbr.be
KBR web archive
Start Date: 2017
Access methods: currently in development
KBR is the national scientific library and collects all Belgian publications via the legal deposit. Since the web can be considered as an enormous publisher, web archiving is a logical extension of the activities of the library. The Royal Decree of 25 December 2016 stipulates that KBR may collect websites that are related to the missions of the institution.
In addition, KBR is currently working together with legal experts to broaden the legal deposit legislation to Belgian web content. It is the intention of KBR to set up a sustainable web archive on the federal level once the new legislation comes into force. In the meantime, KBR is involved in research projects focusing on web archiving and also aims to initiate a web archiving programme on a voluntary basis by asking right holders for permission to capture and make available their content.
KBR has started its web archiving activities through a series of research projects: PROMISE, BESOCIAL and BelgicaWeb. The projects were funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office (Belspo) as part of the BRAIN.be programme and was/is set up as a collaboration between KBR and a number of Belgian universities in order to create multidisciplinary research teams. The team members have expertise in technical aspects (crawling tools, development, data enrichment, …), legal aspects (text and data mining, personal data and privacy, …), curatorial practices and user engagement and outreach to the research community.
Each of the projects had/has a specific focus. PROMISE (2017-2019) aimed to develop a federal strategy for the preservation of Belgian websites. BESOCIAL (2020-2022) focused on setting up a pilot for preserving Belgian social media content from Instagram and Twitter. The BelgicaWeb project (2024-2026) aims to make Belgium’s born-digital heritage accessible and FAIR, i.e. Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, by developing a user-friendly access platform and an API that enables access at data level.