How do we decide to include an international website to the web archive?

Every website that is not registered in a .lu domain is checked manually before being added to our seed lists. There are different criteria to decide whether a website is relevant or not:
– Luxembourgish language
– Luxembourgish town in the website name
– main address/headquarter located in Luxembourg
– main contact phone number is a Luxembourgish phone number
– not more than 5 locations worldwide
– “Made in Luxembourg” logo on the homepage
– Common background images, such as the Philharmonie, Golden Lady, Luxembourg old town etc.
– “Impressum” oder “legal mentions” list the company/organisation as registered in Luxembourg
– The “About us” section mentions the company’s foundation or location in Luxembourg
– The “Team” section mentions that the founders or main team members are from Luxembourg
– Among the “projects”, “clients” or “partners” are many Luxembourgish companies or organisations

BnL

The closest level to the web archive is the BnL staff, not only by operating the LWA, but because all BnL staff has to be the first line of promoters and contributors to its collections. Since the LWA is contributing to the traditional collections of the BnL, so should the expertise used in building these collections help to grow the web archive.

Key Partners

Starting with cultural institutions, such as the CNA and the CNL, the LWA will continue to ask for the participation of key contributors in providing seed lists. These lists should form the basis for thematic collections, such as “Literature”, “Film”, “Photography” and “Music”. Other stakeholders will add seeds to these collections as well, such as the subject experts and organisations interested in seeing their line of work represented in the web archive.

Public Sector

Transparency and access to information are major concerns to the public sector. State and municipality websites contain vital information to every citizen of Luxembourg. Therefore, the government, administrations and municipalities have a high interest in having their content preserved, as a service and obligation to their constituents.

Students and researchers

There are different approaches to using a web archive as a source of information: Close reading, data-centric views, or graph-centric views. Students and researchers are showing more and more interest in all of these approache. However, the mere existence of web archives and their potential to scientific research, are still widely unknown, whereas web archives are only useful to a research project, if the collections meet their needs in content, metadata and access to data. In order to improve its collections and contents for the research questions of tomorrow, it is important to get researchers and students involved in contributing to collections, as well as using and processing data from the LWA. There could also be a possibility of integrating websites, archived by researchers, into the LWA for long-term preservation.

Professional use

Websites get regular updates, companies change plans, every business idea or product spawns a new website, start-ups come and go. The target audience of professional users should find answers to a number problems in the LWA: Companies have an interest in seeing their websites, products and services preserved in the archive. Professional networks and associations should be invested in seeing their sector of activity preserved and need to be included in the process of expanding thematic collections.

Between the professional use and the private use, a very important audience is represented by content creators and website owners. Any person creating or uploading content for a website, has the intention for people to see and access this content on the Internet. The LWA maintains this access for future generations, by providing a valuable service to creators and users alike.

Private use

Most people don’t have a day-to-day need to use a web archive, but might end up looking for a particular website that has disappeared, follow a URL leading to an error code, or try to find that image or document that they had seen before, but is missing now. These needs are most difficult to be addressed by the LWA, since they concern every person and every element of every website. The involvement of every previous level of target audiences, helps in improving the web archive and to meet those needs.
Since the LWA is asking for contributions, suggestions and help from all layers of the collaborative chart, these actors also demand a service in return. From public institutions, to companies and private website owners, all stakeholders will have certain expectations to the harvesting and preservation of their online content. It is therefore crucial to focus not only on communicating the necessity and benefits of web archiving, but also to manage expectations, and explain the possibilities and limitations of our program.