The Royal Library in Copenhagen and the State and University Library in Aarhus are happy to announce the 10 years anniversary of the Netarchive (Netarkivet), the Danish national web archive.
In July 2005, a new legal deposit law came into force: materials “published in electronic communication networks” became part of the legal deposit, that is to say, collecting and preserving “the Danish part of the Internet” now was issued by law. In the same year, the Netarchive joined the IIPC.
In the early years of the Netarchive, we focused on collection building and strategies: how to manage 4 broad crawls a year and choosing about 100 sites to be harvested selectively. At the end of 2005, we finished our first broad crawl – it took almost a year. In 2007, our first systematic set of selective crawls was in place, we had a first dialogue with Facebook about harvesting Danish open profiles, we released NetarchiveSuite as an open source web curator tool and we gave access to the archived material to the first researchers.
In 2008, we started harvesting e-books, and the French National Library and the Austrian National Library joined the NetarchiveSuite development project. In 2009, the first Ph.D. student graduated with a project based on the Netarchive. In 2010, we participated in the first IIPC collaborative collection (Winter Olympic Games). In 2011, we established access through the Wayback Machine and started a special collection on online games.
In 2012, we fulfilled our objective of carrying out four broad crawls a year and began with a special collection on YouTube videos. In 2013, we established access on the premises for eligible master students in their final year and we developed a solution, which makes selected electronic publications from ministries and official agencies accessible to the public via persistent links from The Administrative Library’s catalogue. In 2014, we started indexing for full text search in the whole archive and performed our largest event harvest ever of the European Song Contest, hosted in Denmark.
The birthday gift to our users and to ourselves is the full text searchable archive!
Thank you for cooperation and feedback during all these years.
On behalf of the Netarchive Team
Sabine Schostag, Web curator, NETARCHIVE, STATE AND UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
