Have you ever wondered where your organisation’s website will go as time passes? Did you know that the National Library probably has a copy of it? Or, at least, a copy of some of it?

Right now the National Library of New Zealand are undertaking Web Harvest 2008:

The National Library of New Zealand has a legal mandate and a social responsibility to preserve New Zealand’s social and cultural history, be it in the form of books, newspapers and photographs, or of websites, blogs and YouTube videos.

An increasing amount of New Zealand’s documentary heritage is only available online. New Zealanders find this content valuable and convenient, but its impermanence, lack of clear ownership, and dynamic nature pose significant challenges to our efforts to collect and preserve it.

The public benefit from the safe, long-term preservation of New Zealand’s online heritage is incalculable. Our online social history and much government and institutional history will be preserved for researchers, historians, and ordinary New Zealanders. We will be able to look back on internet documents as we do the printed words left to us by previous generations.

The 2008 domain harvest

During October 2008 the Library will perform a large-scale harvest of the New Zealand internet. We will do this using a ‘web crawler’ to find and download web pages.

The domain harvest will attempt to acquire every publicly accessible website that falls under the nz country code, as well as certain other websites that are owned by New Zealanders or legally considered New Zealand publications.

The internet is always changing, and uses a myriad of technologies, so it is impossible to make a perfect copy. Despite this, we are hoping to harvest 100 million URLs during October 2008, giving us a snapshot of the internet at that time.

The harvested web pages will be stored at the Library, and will eventually be made publicly accessible.

And by the way, the Internet Archive already does some of this with its Wayback Machine. For example, here’s a look at Communitynet Aotearoa from May 2001. Some of the pictures are missig, but it’s still very interesting.

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