News item | 02-10-2025 | 18:45
The website of Peter R. de Vries, the dancing banana of Hyvesor the coronadashboard. All of them great significance for many people and in our country, and sometimes even a strong symbol of our country in a certain time. Just like newspapers from the past, archives from the war and important TV broadcasts, you want them to be preserved and accessible. And yet this type of digital heritage is now sometimes lost. Various heritage parties have already started archiving internet sites carefully, but encounter many problems. To solve that, Minister Gouke Moes (Education, Culture and Science) announces that he will improve regulations.
Minister Moes: “With heritage you quickly think of old books, buildings or things that you can hold. And we all know how important it is to be careful with that. Now that our lives are increasingly taking place in the digital world, it is time to arrange important things for that.”
Better rules to solve practical problems
That it is important to save digital heritage is known for a while at parties that deal with archiving, such as the National Archive, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Sound and National Library KB. It is also technically possible. But in practice they encounter barriers. For example, they still have to ask permission from all those involved around a website, and they do not know where they stand.
To resolve that, Minister Moes wants to arrange a good legal basis for this. Countries around us already have them, but not yet the Netherlands. It is not yet clear how that should be. There is an extensive report on the basis of which preparations for the law process will be started next year. For example, things that need to be selected is who exactly can archive digital heritage. And also which sources are eligible for that and how you capture it properly. It seems logical that at least that is websites that end up .nl, but if you only do those domain names, then you miss domain names that end up on .frl (Fryslân) or .Amsterdam, for example. It is therefore necessary to sort that out well and also to remove the costs, together with the aforementioned parties involved.
What that legal basis will look like is further investigated and worked out. The planning is that the improved legislation must be ready in 4 years. In the meantime, archive parties can continue to do web archiving on the current limited scale.