Barbara Sierman

As information and communication technology has become pervasive in our society, we are increasingly dependent on both digital data and repositories that provide access to and enable the use of such resources. Repositories must earn the trust of the communities they intend to serve and demonstrate that they are reliable and capable of appropriately managing the data they hold.

In 2007, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the Dutch National Library (KB-NL), started the project ‘webarchiving’ based on a selection of Dutch websites. The initial selection of 1000 websites has currently grown into over 12,000 selected websites, crawled at different intervals. Although due to legal restrictions the current use is limited to the KB-NL reading room, it is important that the KB-NL includes the requirements of the (future) users in its approach to creating a web collection. With respect to the long-term preservation of the collection, we also need to incorporate the requirements for long-term archiving in our approach, as described in the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Model ISO 14721: 2012. This article describes the results of a research project on webarchiving and the web collection of archived sites in the KB-NL, investigating the following questions. What is webarchiving in the Netherlands? What are the selection criteria of KB-NL and how are these related to what can be found on the Dutch web by the contemporary user? What is the influence of the choice of tools we use to harvest the final archived website? Do we know enough of the value of the web collection and the potential usage of it by researchers and how can we improve this value? This article will describe the outcomes of the research, the conclusions and advice that can be drawn from it and it is hoped will inspire broader discussions about the essence of creating web collections for long-term preservation as part of cultural heritage.

This article describes the developments in The Netherlands to establish a national Network for Digital Heritage. This network is based on three pillars: to make the digital heritage visible, usable, and sustainably preserved. Three working programs will have their own but integrated set of dedicated actions in order to create a national infrastructure in The Netherlands, based on an optimal use of existing facilities. In this article the focus is on the activities related to the sustainable preservation of the Dutch national digital heritage.

Before the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Board of Directors of the Foundation CENL, Zagreb, September 24–27, 2008, the author presented a clear overview of the latest developments in digital preservation in a European context. She dealt with organisational aspects, the digital objects themselves, and the effects of international European collaboration. She calls on European organisations such as the Alliance for Permanent Access to sustain the results of temporary projects like PLANETS and thereby bring the pieces of the digital preservation puzzle together. This paper is being published in preparation of the workshop on Curating Research: e-Merging New Roles and Responsibilities in the European Landscape, which is being co-organised by LIBER on 17 April 2009 at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague.