Untangling Nordic Web Archives

Future historians studying the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries will have to make use of source material that was originally published online. Over a few decades, the Internet has become a primary platform for cultural phenomena that previously only existed offline. These virtual expressions are extremely transitory and Sisyphean to archive in real time. This chapter explores and compares the macro-archiving strategies employed by the web archives of the Nordic countries, namely, the Danish Netarkivet, Finnish Suomalainen verkkoarkisto, Icelandic Vefsafnið, Norwegian Nettarkivet, and Swedish Kulturarw3. Nordic web archives seek to harvest all content available on the Internet at a certain date and year, and they are in this sense alike, although they employ different strategies. In this chapter, we discuss their differences and similarities and consider to what extent there is a distinct Nordic tradition of web archiving.