Presentation at the ICA/SPP conference on webarchving, 28 October 2015 (Konrad Adenauer Stiftung)

1. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
Developing a web archiving
strategy for national
movements in Flanders (and
Europe)
Tom Cobbaert (ADVN)
ICA/SPP conference
Berlin, 28-30 October 2015

2. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
ADVN: organisation

3. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
• founded in 1984
– by historians and representatives of the Flemish
movement
• non-profit organisation (vzw/asbl)
– 15 FTE’s
• private archives
– archives of persons, organisations, political parties
• funding by the Flemish government
– as a cultural archive, a “collection-managing cultural-
heritage organisation of nationwide importance”
• local, national and international collaboration
ADVN: organisation

4. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
ADVN: collections

5. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
ADVN: archives and research centre for
Flemish-nationalism
[°WW1 / nationbuilding / radical, anti-Belgian, separatist /
specific political parties]
Flemish movement
[°19th c. / emancipation (language, culture, socio-ec.) /
general and pragmatic / broad movement]
National movements in Europe
+ theory on nationalism, national identity, nation building
ADVN: collections > profile

6. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
ADVN: collections > numbers
[at 31/12/2014]
• transfers: 11842 in total (1984-2014)
• archives (paper): approx. 6350 m
• archives (digital): approx. 6 TB
• audiovisual archives: 67616 items
• books & brochures: 51486 titles
• periodicals: 11417 titles

7. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
ADVN: core functions

8. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
ADVN: core functions
• acquisition
– based on archival provenance
• management
– storage, processing, preservation and conservation
• facilitating research
– projects (in collaboration with other archives, research
institutions and universities)
– hosting scientific journal Wetenschappelijke tijdingen
• public services
– reading room and website access to collections
– conferences, lectures, exhibitions, guided tours,
ADVN-Mededelingen magazine

9. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
ADVN: core functions
• coordination centre of NISE (www.nise.eu)
“National movements and Intermediary
Structures in Europe” (°2009)
– international platform for transnational and
comparative research on nationalism, national and
regional movements in Europe
– network of 40+ research and heritage institutions
– developing DIANE: digital research infrastructure
– organising conferences, lectures, seminars, workshops
– publications: Studies on National Movements (open
access journal), Proceedings, Monographs
– services: archival consultancy, data management

10. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
ADVN & web archiving

11. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
ADVN & web archiving (2005-2015)
• 2005-2006: experimental project
– archiving a random selection of nationalist party and
politician websites
– harvest using (Win)HTTRack
• 2007-today: collection of digital periodicals
– newsletters via e-mail or websites
– active acquisition + retroactive harvesting
– 300+ titles
• 2011: EFA social media project
– mapping social media of EFA member parties
– training on archiving tools for social media

12. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
ADVN & web archiving (2005-2015)
• 2014: need for a (new) digital collection strategy
– internal reorganisation of ADVN + decreased funding
– foundation of VIAA (2013) and start of mass-
digitisation projects (AV-archives and WW1-press)
– increasing demand for digital access to collections
• 2015: developing 5-point action plan
– digital document management training
– active digital acquisition (incl. web and social
media)
– 2-track digitisation: collaborative + on-demand
– (shared) digital preservation infrastructure
– digital collection tools

13. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy

14. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy
• developing a strategy for web archiving:
– Approach: what?
– Collaboration: who?
– Tools: how?
– Issues:
• permission by author, creator and provider
• authenticy, integrity and quality control
• providing access and the law
• preservation

15. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: approach

16. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: approach
• selective harvesting:
– “representative selection of organisations and
persons (considered) belonging to the broad Flemish
movement and acting on a nationwide level”
– associations: political parties (N-VA, VB),
organisations and action groups
– persons: members of parliament (VL, BE, EU) + other
– on regular basis (quarterly+ elections)
• from Flanders to Europe:
– consolidate harvest for Flemish movement
– ambition to expand to other national movements

17. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: approach
• technical:
– client-side harvest
– server-side harvest: (limited) fallback option. Focuses
on html for static sites and database exports for
dynamic sites
• services:
– websites (incl. blogs)
– Twitter (public accounts)
– Facebook (pages)

18. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: collaboration

19. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: collaboration
• no (known) national/domain archiving in
Flanders or Belgium:
– formal collaboration between national library (KBR)
and state archives (ARA) remains inactive/undercover
– research project on legal deposit of Flemish electronic
publications, incl. websites (2015-2016)
– most known webarchiving initiatives are limited:
• FelixArchief: websites & social media managed by the City of
Antwerp and its agencies
• University Library Ghent: websites & social media of UGent
• Flemish Government: websites of government agencies

20. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: collaboration
• international initiatives (relevant to ADVN):
– Internet Archive:
• best known worldwide webarchiving initiative (1996-today)
• most extensive resource for Belgian websites
• only crawl the surface of the web (random test against ADVN
selection showed ca. 40% of sites were not archived)
– ArchiveTeam:
• “a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers
and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage”
• first emerged in 2009 when Yahoo! decided to terminate
GeoCities and continued since archiving user-generated
content hosted at ‘doomed’ internet services
• collaborate with the Internet Archive (upload/backup)

21. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: tools

22. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: tools
• 2005-2006 project used HTTrack
– user-friendly, open source crawler and browser
– does not support WARC (Web ARChive) file format
• currently testing (keeping options open):
– Web Curator Tool (workflow + Heritrix + Wayback)
– Wget (with WARC output) + Wayback
– HTTrack + HTTrack2ARC + Wayback (for existing
harvests)

23. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: issues

24. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: issues
• permission of author?
– permission-based or “online information is public”
– right to be forgotten vs right on information
• permission of creator?
– e.g. copyrighted design or proprietary CMS
• permission of service provider?
– e.g. Twitter blocking API in Politwoops case
need to keep balance between
position of author and researcher

25. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: issues
• shifting authenticity?
– as many browers/technologies, as many possible
representations of content
• maintaining integrity?
– broken links + links to external content (images,
video)
• managing quality control?
– time consuming evaluation
need for pragmatic policies

26. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: issues
• providing (online) access and the (Belgian)
law:
– copyright: permission author is needed (until 70
years after death)
• permission-based harvest = solution?
• what about: multiple editors, webdesigners, media (used
with/out permission), illegal content
– privacy: any re-use of personal data is prohibited
• broad definition of personal data > almost every website
• legal solution: acces limited to intra-muros
need for a better legislative context

27. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: issues
• preservation problems?
– server dependency of dynamic sites
– wide range of file formats
– persistence of link structure (names!)
– durability of WARC as an archiving standard
need for nationwide action
& international collaboration
on long-term preservation

28. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
web archiving strategy: issues
• selection!
– specialist thematic curation vs holistic harvest
(flemish-nationalist or far-right parties and
organisations generally don’t use .be-domain or clear
findable websites, rather .org, .eu or general services)

29. Developing a web archiving strategy for
national movements in Flanders (and Europe)
Questions?
Tom Cobbaert
Archivist | Head of Collections
ADVN vzw
Lange Leemstraat 26
2018 Antwerp
www.advn.be
[Email] tom.cobbaert@advn.be
[Twitter] @tomcobbaert