Towards a national web in a federated country : a Belgian case study

Although the .be domain was introduced in June 1988, the Belgian web is currently not systematically archived. As of August 2016, 1.550.147 domains are registered by DNS Belgium. Without a Belgian web archive, the content of these websites will not be preserved for future generations and a significant portion of Belgian history will be lost forever. In this paper we present the initial findings of a research project exploring the policy, legal, technical and scientific issues around archiving the Belgian web. The aim of this project is to a) identify current best practices in web-archiving b) pilot a Belgian web archive and c) identify research use cases for the scientific study of the Belgian web. This case study is seen as a first step towards implementing a long-term web archiving strategy for Belgium