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Archiving Asia-Pacific Websites

Gateways readers will be very familiar with the National Library’s selective archiving of Australian websites, since 1996, into the PANDORA archive. Indeed we have been one of the early pioneers in web archiving globally.

Selective archiving of overseas websites, especially Asia-Pacific ones, has begun recently. Collecting research-level publications from the Asia-Pacific is one of the focuses of the Library’s collection development activities, and it has now been extended to websites. After some initial trials last year we have now started to harvest websites using a tool called Archive-It, provided by the Internet Archive (www.archive-it.org), a non-profit body based in the United States with extensive experience in web domain harvests. The harvested websites are also hosted by the Internet Archive and made searchable via their search engine, called the ‘Wayback Machine’.

Staff in the Asian Collections Branch and the Overseas Collection Development Unit have created a number of collections. Each of these has a theme and contains a number of websites identified by staff and, at times, with input from researchers. These collections are:

  • Cambodian National Election 2008
  • Thai Election 2007
  • Burmese Uprising 2007
  • Indonesian Islamic Organisations
  • Papua New Guinea Elections 2007
  • Papua New Guinea Government and Research Websites
  • East Timor Elections 2007

As expected, some websites have already disappeared from the Internet since the last harvest. This is especially likely if the collection documents an ephemeral moment in history, such as an election. Researchers have expressed appreciation that the National Library is taking on this initiative to preserve these materials.

While the actual websites are hosted on the Internet Archive, we have created bibliographic records and our own web pages to facilitate discovery. Information on the Asian archived websites can be found at www.nla.gov.au/asian/asianwebarchive.html, while the Pacific archived websites are featured on www.nla.gov.au/collect/PacificWebArchiveCollections.html.

The Asian and Pacific web archives will continue to grow, enhancing the National Library’s already significant collection of material from the Asia-Pacific region. More collections will be created as appropriate and added to the Library’s web pages.

Wan Wong
Director (Acting), Asian Collections

Meredith Batten
Manager, Overseas Collection Development Unit