National Széchényi Library has started to focus on the preservation of digital-born documents since the early 2000’s. Firstly, the Hungarian Electronic Library then the Electronic Periodical Archive and Database and finally the Digital Archive of Images had established. The initial idea about creating a web archive at the National Széchényi Library (NSZL) appeared in 2006, and then the obligation to create such a collection has become a part of the regulation of acquisition rules in 2015. The necessary personal and infrastructural conditions had fulfilled in 2017 by the framework of the National Library System Project. Followed by a two and a half year long test period the periodical harvest of a segment of the Hungarian web space had started and in parallel the web archiving collection had established. The main aim of the NSZL Web Archive is to offer a representative overview about online contents intended to the Hungarian public or related to Hungary as a part of our cultural heritage.
Acquisition of documents has based on three main different ways: At first making a selection from the most important Hungarian websites, secondly making event-based harvests from main news resources and thirdly making general, representative harvests from the Hungarian web space. Selective harvesting is focusing on a group of scientific, cultural, educational and public sphere related websites. The general harvest covers websites have registered on .hu domain and some related materials from other domains intended to be made for Hungarian audience. Web harvesting only covers those websites from where automated collecting of materials is technically available. During the harvesting process the harvesting robot is respecting the regulations has set by the website owner.
In case of archived web content NSZL wants to establish a long-term preservation model. In order to respect privacy and copyright rules only a small part of the collection is publicly available. Websites are publicly available only if NSZL already has the permission of service from the content owner. The rest of the archive will be only available within a dedicated network primarily for research purposes followed by the creation of the necessary legal environment.
As there is no significant experience related to web archiving in Hungary, this website may to appear as a knowledgebase in this field. Beyond the introduction to the web archive and to the project, separate groups of resources (info-materials, documents etc.) are available for every-day users, for content-owners, for professional experts and for journalists.
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