The National and University Library of Iceland opened on 1 December 1994. To mark the Library’s anniversary this year, new features of the web archive will be presented: the Library has collected Icelandic material from the World Wide Web since 2004 and made it available on the website Vefsafn.is.
The Library has collected Icelandic material from the World Wide Web since 2004 and made it available on the website Vefsafn.is. In these ten years an enormous amount of material has been collected: over 2 billion documents and tens of thousands of gigabytes in all. The web, however, is rather older than 10 years, and it has been a drawback that the web archive did not go further back.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive (http://archive.org) has collected web material from all over the world since 1996. Until now, Icelanders have therefore had to turn to this organisation for web material older than 2004. But not any more.
Earlier this year the National and University Library of Iceland and the Internet Archive agreed to exchange data. The Library receives a copy of all the Icelandic material found in the Internet Archive’s holdings from the beginning up to the end of 2004. This material has now been added to Vefsafn.is and will be made available there on 29 November. The web material has come home.
In return, the Internet Archive receives digital copies of Icelandic books that are out of copyright. The Library has been digitising such books in recent years and publishing them on the website Bækur.is. This exchange of data makes these books safer, since digital copies will be kept outside the country. In all, copies of over 700 books have been delivered to the Internet Archive, and that work continues alongside the Library’s digitisation of books.
Continuous harvesting
Another new feature, to be presented on Vefsafn.is on 29 November, is the continuous harvesting of news sites and other websites that change rapidly.
The Library’s regular harvests of web material are carried out three times a year. As a great deal can happen in between, selected websites have been harvested weekly. But a week can also be a long time.
Over the past year the Library has therefore been developing and testing continuous harvesting of the websites that change the most. This is done using the websites’ RSS feeds, so that the harvests follow when new material appears on a website. Changes can thus be captured from one minute to the next. In this way we do not miss the moments when major events first hit the news. It will be possible to browse through them almost minute by minute and see how the news developed online.