Filing of the Web

The Web is essentially transitory media. Certain sites are updated very often, others disappear or change supplier or shelterer. Vis-a-vis this report, it was tried, from the point of view of conservation of the inheritance, to proceed to the filing of the Fabric. These concerns are not recent, if one considers that the National library of Canada launched its projects as of June 1994 and that Internet Files, one of the most known organizations in the filing of Internet, was created in 1996.

Principles and difficulties

The idea of the filing of the Web leaves the principle which it is about means of communication more and more used and which it is important to keep the trace so that testimonys of the time remain. The partisans of the filing of the Web stress that these means of communication are used in a preferential way by groups which publish little in the other media, and which to forget them in the conservation of the inheritance would lead to a vision partial of the company.

There exist two manners of considering this filing technically. Filing manual (or semi-automatic) seeks to collect sites, deposited on an institutional file or a support off line (Compact disk for example). That supposes a preliminary selection of information. In addition, this method presents “solidified” sites to a given moment. The other method is that of automatic filing using robots of indexing. These robots traverse the Web with regular intervals, and aspire (in English snapshot ) the whole of the Web or possibly a part (by selecting for example a Domain name). This method rather presents a fixed form of the Web (the Web such as it was at a given time).

The filing of the Web encounters several difficulties:

need for a powerful memory, asking for in particular the participation of many waiters;
the problem of the relevance of the formats, in particular for the files present inside the pages (images, Applet S);
the difficulty of access to the major Web, which makes that part of the production can escape filing;
problems involved in the rights of Intellectual property.

Achievements

Internet Files

Selection of the National library of Australia

It is in 1996 also that the National library of Australia inaugurated its system of filing, under the name of PANDORA. With the assistance of other institutions Australian, it decided to select sites considered to be representative. The selection criteria were the subject of dialogs and are re-examined periodically. It is thus about a manual filing.

In France

The National library of France received as of 1992, in the form of gifts, of the copies of sites, which are preserved at the department of Audioviuel (also charged with multi-media), sometimes under conditions. The institution, in particular its department of the numeric library, undertook several studies on filing, either automatic, or handbook, of Internet sites. The National institute of audio-visual the also began research of the same type. Selective trial collections were launched at the time of the elections, in particular of the presidential and the legislative of 2002, to file the sites of the candidates like certain sites with political character.

Parallel to these studies, the idea came to extend the Registration of copyright to the Web. It was the direction of the provisions of article 10 of the bill on the company of information, deposited in 2001 by the government of Lionel Jospin. It envisaged the automatic collection, while envisaging other methods in the event of difficulties in the automatic collection. It is a kind of compromise between the first and the second method. The bill was indeed filed in before the Parliament, but was not examined and became null and void at the end of the legislature. The idea thus was included in the bill on the Royalty and rights close in the company to information (law DADVSI), deposited on November 12th 2003. The law was adopted and published on August 1st, 2006. It provides that the organizations agents of the Registration of copyright “can carry out themselves this collection according to automatic procedures or to determine of them the methods in agreement with these people” However, it will return to the Decree on enforcement of a law to fix the details of this organization. The decree will have to also determine the institution (S) responsible (S) for this registration of copyright, because the National library of France and the National institute of audio-visual the wish one and the other to take part in it.

The Public records also tried out the filing of the institutional sites, in particular of the Presidency of the Republic, the Prime Minister and different the ministries.

Canadian initiatives

The Canada was among the first to consider the filing of the Web through the Electronic Publication Stud Project (EPPP), inaugurated in 1994 within Bibliothèque and Archives Canada.

Initially, the Quebec decided as for him to privilege the “publications” which approach the printed , i.e. the sites considered as stable and connected with Monographie S, and the periodic sites, of which there exists a new version regularly deposited. The sites are filed by the National library of Quebec and are consultable only on the spot, and provided that the original site is not maintained any more.

Scandinavian achievements

The Scandinavian countries were also interested in the deposit of the Web, as from September 1996 with the royal Bibliothèque of Sweden, and a regular way as from April 1997. The Finland launched a project EVA tending to the conservation of the whole of the Finnish Web. The Denmark was among the first countries to modify its legislation on the Registration of copyright in this direction.

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