Since last year, the KB also includes political party websites in its Web Collection. You can now find a description of this collection on the website (in Dutch). The websites can be viewed in the KB reading room.
A link between citizens and politics
Politics has a lot of influence on our society and therefore on people's daily lives. This is particularly noticeable at the start of a new administration, when political choices feature heavily in the news and dominate public debate. Political parties play a crucial role in this, since they serve as the link between citizens and politics.
Websites are one of the main channels through which political parties present their positions on issues and plans to the public. But information changes rapidly and political parties disappear and merge. That is why it is so important to record these websites. The KB and the Website Documentation Centre Dutch Political Parties (DNPP) in Groningen contribute to this by archiving political party websites. They thereby ensure that this information can and will be used, now and in the future, to better understand the political debate.
Collaboration
Because of their high social value, political party websites have been archived by the Website Documentation Centre Dutch Political Parties (DNPP) since 2001. For years, the KB deliberately chose not to store these websites to avoid duplication. Due to the increasing importance of this information – including for academic research – the KB and the DNPP have now decided to work more closely together to preserve and provide access to these sources in a sustainable way. The number of sites is relatively limited in size, but combined with the DNPP web archive, it forms a unique historical web collection of interest to a very wide audience and is part of the democratic heritage of the Netherlands.
Prof Dr Carla Hoetink of the DNPP: "The KB's technical expertise combined with our content expertise has resulted in a concise, high-quality special web collection. We want to work more closely together in the future to better connect the collections of our institutions so that they can be consulted integrally for academic research."
What is in the collection?
The web collection contains archive versions of websites of national political parties and breakaway parties that have (or have had) one or more seats in the Senate and/or House of Representatives since September 2025. Party websites will remain part of the collection for as long as they are available online, even after any loss of seats.
In addition to political party websites, the KB also archives the websites of research institutes scientific bureaus and youth wings. Local branches, water authorities and the Caribbean Netherlands are (for now) excluded from the selection.
Want to know more?
Want to know more about the Political Parties web collection? View the collection description and list of selected websites. Good to know: the archived websites can be viewed in the KB reading room for anyone with a KB annual pass. The collection will be added to periodically.
The importance of web archiving
The internet is fleeting: today's online information may be gone without trace tomorrow. The KB therefore selects and preserves as many culturally important websites and homepages as possible, as part of the national library collection. Building special web collections around current social or cultural themes is an important means to this end. Other special web collections include the LGBT+ web collection, the XS4ALL web collection and the COVID web collection.
In October 2025, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science announced it was working on improved legislation for web archiving.
