A national Web Trend Index based on national web archives

A number of historical studies of national web already exist (Brügger and Laursen, in press.) but systematic basic information about a national web and its changes over time is lacking. This could be information about the number of websites, of specific file types, or of hyperlinks to social media platforms, as well as information about hyperlink structures or prevailing languages on a national web.
In this presentation, we will argue for the establishment of what we call a national Web Trend Index. Such an index can support future studies of the history of the web and be relevant for researchers, web archives, web companies, and civil society as an important source to understand national webs and their historical development. The national Web Trend Index should provide metrics for how national web domains have developed over time, and it must be flexible enough as to accomodate for new metrics to be included as the online web, the web collections, and the interests of all stakeholders change. The presentation will illustrate some of the most obvious metrics to include in such a national Web Trend Index and we will outline how the index can be built based on a systematic, transparent and reproducable approach. We will argue that a national Web Trend Index is best made and suistained in an organisationel setup including curators, developers and researchers. Finally, transnational perspectives for a Web Trend Index are discussed.