Looking back, looking forward: 10 years of development to collect, preserve and access the Danish Web

Digital heritage archiving is an ongoing activity that requires commitment, involvement and cooperation between heritage institutions and policy makers as well as producers and users of information. In this presentation, we will address how a web archive is created over time as well as what or who drives the development of a web archive. Empirically, we will look back on the 10 years of development to collect, preserve and access the Danish web, in the Danish national web archive called Netarkivet. In particular, we will address how a web archive is created and re-created over time in relation to 1) the development of the scope of the collection, 2) archival management practices, and 3) methods of accessing the archive. All three aspects can be looked at in the view of one of the biggest challenges many web archives face: The ever growing size of the archive. In addition, we will address how we see the development of the web archive in the near future. Findings are relevant for curators and researchers interested in the web archive as a historical source.