Posted on 15 September 2014
The Historical Archives of the European Union has completed its first ever web archiving project. As an outcome of this pilot, carried out in collaboration with the Internet Memory Foundation, the Historical Archives received valuable findings and recommendations for the development of a web archiving strategy for EU Institutions.
“The Historical Archives recognises that the internet possesses a wealth of information under constant change and risk of evanescence, and to this end we launched a web archiving pilot on EU institutions’ websites”, says Dieter Schlenker, Director of the Historical Archives.
In the pilot, the EU institutions’ website contents were captured with so called crawling software. Starting from given URLs, the crawling software processes the websites and stores the content in an international standard archive format. The pilot continues with two more crawls of all EU Institutions’ websites in 2014, one currently in progress and a last one in November. So far, with the first crawl completed and evaluated, the open source solution used has given satisfactory and encouraging results in the context of EU institutions. The results will be used to evaluate the project and develop the future strategy.
With the pilot project, the Historical Archives is assisting the EU Institutional Working Group on Web Preservation lead by the EU Publications Office with practical experience and concrete figures to evaluate the web archiving activity and provide recommendations to the EU decision making bodies.
The Historical Archives, jointly with the Internet Memory Foundation, has now made available a public access platform to these archives. Once fully operational the web archiving exercise will expand to include also the various EU Agencies and will mount up to four complete archival snapshots per year.
Reasons for preserving websites are many. Web archiving ensures access to digital content created as organisations’ official and public communications while also capturing the corporative visual identity. The value is also in providing evidence of specific moments in time of the EU Institutions’ life. In this sense, the project team also investigates into completing the collections backwards through collaboration with the Internet Archive organisation in San Francisco, USA, that has archived the EU Institutional websites for more than a decade.
Website: http://collections.internetmemory.org/haeu
Contact the Historical Archives: [email protected]
Contact the EU Working Group on Web Preservation: [email protected]