National Library archives historically valuable XS4ALL homepages

Web-archiving is entirely manual work

The KB's role is making the national library collection visible, usable and preservable. The KB web collection is one the institution's digital collections, consisting of 20,391 websites. In 2016, the KB got involved in 'web archaeology': tracing websites from the early days of the internet that still existed online and deserved preserving. Kees was behind a project called Internet archaeology: web-archiving XS4ALL homepages and took responsibility for the practical archiving activities. "The KB's web-archiving team discovered that many XS4ALL homepages were worth conserving, because quite a lot of the provider's old homepages were still available on the web," recalls Kees. "However, lots of the pages weren't in the Internet Archive, a digital archive that includes various collections of websites. The reason being that the XS4ALL homepages were so old that no other websites had links to them. That effectively made them invisible to Google and the Internet Archive's crawlers. With a real risk of the homepages being lost, we felt something had to be done urgently to select and preserve important sites. The time-consuming part was the selection, because it involved looking at more than 18,848 homepages to decide which ones to keep. Then we had to ask the pioneers who created them for permission to archive their pages. That's all manual work."

Overview of the homepages of XS4ALL customers, as shown by the provider itself around 2000.

Selection and description procedure

"I decided which homepages we should preserve, and why," explained Kees. "I then recorded details of each site and the reasons for archiving it in the collection catalogue. Future researchers need that information to understand why individual homepages were and weren't preserved. Sometimes we didn't preserve a site because it was too similar to another, and sometimes we couldn't get the owner's permission. If permission wasn't forthcoming, we could at least record what was on the site, so that all trace of it isn't lost." "In most cases, the reason for archiving a page was that it was seen as having cultural-historical value to future generations. Other criteria we applied included historical significance, amenity value, commemorative value and completeness. We also considered authenticity, technical quality, representativeness and ensemble value. That's its importance as part of a larger body of interrelated sites, which together have a story to tell. Pages with a high ensemble value were preserved together. An example of a homepage that caught our eye because of its uniqueness is one written in Dutch, English, Frisian and Esperanto. We didn't hesitate to preserve that, because of its rarity value. Of the 18,848 homepages we looked at, only the best 413 were selected for preservation. All are pages of great cultural-historical significance, which are representative of a particular strand of development. The archived homepages are accessible to all current KB members and are available in our reading room."

Support from SIDN Fund

Financial support from SIDN Fund enabled the XS4ALL homepage web-archiving project to continue. The Fund also helped the KB to contact former XS4ALL personnel and facilitated the technical implementation. "Personal contacts are important in projects like this," emphasises Kees. "Digital archiving begins with analogue contact. SIDN Fund's support was therefore invaluable. I look forward to the possibility of working with the Fund on other similar projects in the future."

Mieke van Heesewijk, Programme Manager at SIDN Fund, explained what attracted the Fund to the initiative. "I used to work for XS4ALL myself, so that made it easier for us to help Kees with the networking. It's important that digital history is well recorded. The pages archived in this project are vital to the understanding of web history and how the internet developed."

Valuable collaboration with the academic community

"Although the collection catalogue was completed on 30 June, there are also lots of great stories that I want to record. Behind every XS4ALL homepage, there's a unique and sometimes very personal story. I want to get some of those stories by talking to the internet pioneers who built the websites. I want to know why they created their sites, what the thinking behind them was and how they represented themselves online. For this follow-up project, I'm working with Professor Susan Aasman, Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Groningen. She's doing a project linked to the XS4ALL homepages, which involves recording the type of personal pioneer stories I'm interested in. The stories will help future generations get a picture of how Dutch digital culture developed. Collaboration with academics and internet pioneers means we can help each other preserve our digital heritage and inspire each other to do further research. Together, the XS4ALL homepage web collection and the story compendium will shed real light on one of the most innovative periods in Dutch digital history." If you'd like to know more about the archived XS4ALL homepages, you can read the collection catalogue. The web archive is also available to view at the KB itself.

Photo: National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague.