The Dutch portion of the World Wide Web is growing by leaps and bounds. In 2006 this .nl domain had existed only 20 years, yet it is impossible to imagine Dutch society today without it. In 1986 the first .nl top level domain was registered by the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica; CWI) in Amsterdam. This made cwi.nl the first .nl domain name, and it still exists to this day.
In 2006 the two-millionth .nl domain name was registered. Now there are more than 2.6 million .nl domain names registered with the Foundation for Internet Domain Registration in the Netherlands (Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland; SIDN), making the Netherlands the third largest “country code Top Level Domain” in the world.
Why this archive?
The internet has an enormous impact on our daily life, the way we present and gather information and the way we communicate and do business. This influence is also being felt in the Netherlands. Take the ‘stemwijzer’, for instance, the website that for many Dutch people was a decisive factor in the way they cast their votes. We are more and more likely to purchase items via the internet or base our purchases on comparison sites. Unneeded possessions change hands on market sites and bands become famous on YouTube. Anyone who has anything to tell the world keeps a weblog, and when it’s time to book a trip or pay a bill we also rely on the internet.
Within the government, the cultural heritage community and academia, the internet has also developed into the most important medium for distributing, exchanging and gathering information. More and more of this information is published exclusively on the web, and as a result the web is increasingly becoming our most important information source. The growing dependence on the web has its flip side, however. The ease with which information can be deleted or changed makes the web highly vulnerable. Information on the web is often quite transitory and short-lived. The average life expectancy of a web page is believed to be no more than about 45 days.
On the other hand, we are increasingly recognising that the web is part of our cultural heritage. In its “Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage”, UNESCO refers to the web as a form of digital heritage. All aspects of our modern culture are represented on the World Wide Web; publications, debate, art, work and social interaction all have their presence on the web. This makes the web an important source for future researchers, not only for studies of the development of the web but certainly for research on society today.