KB celebrates 15 years of web archiving 

The KB launched a major initiative in 2006: from that point on, in addition to digital publications and written heritage in physical form, the national library also had to sustainably store websites for the future. In early 2007, the first Dutch website was then added to the KB’s digital archive. Fifteen years and over 21,000 archived websites later, the KB is taking a celebratory look back at this remarkable heritage preservation project with Web Archiving Week (from 31 January to 4 February). 

‘The first website we archived was that of the Thomas Institute at Tilburg University’, says Peter de Bode, web archiving collections specialist at the KB, who has been involved with this KB collection department from the very beginning. ‘The De Groene Stoker is our most recently archived website. As the KB has a heritage preservation mandate, we have focused from the outset on archiving websites that are of cultural and historical significance to the Netherlands. Selecting websites and building special web collections centred on current social or cultural themes is a key starting point in this regard.’ 

The KB’s total web collection currently comprises over 21,000 websites, which together contain 37 terabytes of data. The thematic web archive now houses 21 collections, covering topics ranging from the Dutch blogosphere, websites relating to COVID-19 and socially critical websites, to XS4ALL homepages, the Netherlands during the First World War, and the Caribbean Netherlands. 

So, an extensive web collection has been built up over the course of 15 years, but the national library’s ambitions extend even further. If it were up to the KB, it would preserve all websites published in the Dutch domain, but it lacks the legal mandate to do so. De Bode: ‘Countries such as Denmark, Germany and France have what is known as legal deposit legislation, under which national libraries are permitted to archive the entire national web domain. The Netherlands isn’t quite there yet, although discussions about this are ongoing. The KB would welcome this legislation, so that we can build as comprehensive a record of the Netherlands’ national memory as possible. Not only regarding the written word, such as with books, but also our born-digital heritage, such as websites and social media.’ 

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the KB’s web archiving work, the KB is hosting #WebArchivingWeek from 31 January to 4 February – online, of course. Three explanatory videos will be published during the week, in which Kees Teszelszky, curator of digital collections at the KB, explores the past (Part 1), the present (Part 2) and the future (part 3) of web archiving at the national library (the KB).