National Mini-IIPC: setting up collaboration in web archiving in The Netherlands 12:00-12:30

Arnoud Goos, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Of all the Dutch websites, only one percent is actually archived by one of the national web archives. A lot goes lost, or is already gone. In The Netherlands there are many organisations that have relatively small web archives. Collaboration between them is important. Each of these national or regional archives have their own reasons for archiving websites and they have their own collection scope and selection criteria. The Royal Library is by far the largest web archive in The Netherlands, but besides them there is the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision that is collecting media related websites, the University of Groningen that is collecting political websites and quite a few regional archives that collect websites from local schools, sport clubs, local festivals or other websites on the life in the city or region. Up until recently these web archives were acting on their own, sometimes even without knowing each other’s existence.

This has changed over the past two years. The Digital Heritage Network and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision have worked on setting up collaboration between these different initiatives. With starting an web archiving expert group, a sort of national mini-IIPC has been created. Besides organizing conferences, the Digital Heritage Network has produced videos on the importance of web archiving, and developed the National Register for Archived Websites. This register is an overview of all the websites that have been archived in the Netherlands. It shows the archived URL, the period in which it was crawled, the tools that were used, how accessible the archived website is and the reason for archiving the website. This overview is at first accessible for web archiving professionals (to see what colleagues are archiving and what not), but when all the data is up to date, it will be made accessible for the public. Because of copyright issues, the register for now only contains metadata and links to the web archives’ live websites instead of the archives pages. Hopefully, this can change in the near future.