(14 March 2019) The National Library of Australia has just launched its Australian Web Archive – a massive, freely accessible collection of content that provides a historical record of the development of world wide web content in Australia over more than two decades.
The new archive is a momentous achievement. Containing annual captures of all accessible pages on .au domains and dating back to 1996, it dwarfs even the Library’s own PANDORA Web archive – a curated collection of Australian web content deemed to be of national significance by the librarians.
That the Library has managed to construct this national web archive, and to conduct annual captures of the .au domain since 2005, is all the more remarkable given the chronic underfunding of its activities by successive federal governments. But with the increased use of social media and apps, the next step is to archive platforms such as Facebook and Twitter – unfortunately, this will be an even bigger challenge.
The Conversation has the news in full.
