The Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science will amend the law to make it easier to archive web content. The KB is very pleased with this news. The Ministry wants to have the legislation ready by 2029, but the KB feels this can and must happen faster. “Too much information is already being lost from the internet because cultural heritage institutions find it difficult to archive web content or are even prohibited from doing so.”
Web content and legislation
Cultural heritage institutions such as the KB and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision archive websites in The Netherlands. An important task, as our history is now mostly written online. An increasing amount of information is only being published in digital form on the internet. This information is volatile as web sources are frequently updated and can therefore quickly disappear forever.
Under current legislation, the KB has to request personal permission from every website creator to archive their website. This is time and labour intensive, which means that the KB often misses out on the archiving opportunity. The average web page only exists for about 90 days, after which it is changed or completely deleted. The Ministry will now work on the legislation to make web archiving easier, but the KB is worried that implementation will take longer than necessary.
Martijn Kleppe, the Board of Directors’ member responsible for Research & Discovery: "Websites, posts on social media, forums and videos of today are of great value to the researchers of the future. These digital activities provide good insight into the concerns of Dutch society and how we look at the world. It is great news that the Ministry is working on making it easier to archive websites. As far as we’re concerned, this cannot happen fast enough. More and more material is added online every day but we can currently only preserve a fraction of it. As a result, much of what defines our history and identity is lost. The Minister is now proposing to conduct a two-year study first. That is too long and could be shortened by a year, so that we can more quickly archive our digital past for future generations."
The KB web archive
The KB currently stores some 24,660 websites totalling 118 terabytes. That might seem like a lot, but the national web domain contains over 6 million websites. In the future, the KB hopes to archive all Dutch web content.
