The National Library collects, and preserves for long-term access, snapshots of websites that document and reflect Australian society and culture. The Library's collection of websites and web documents is known as the Australian Web Archive and is publicly accessible through Trove. The web archive collection is built through collaborative selective web archiving, known as the PANDORA Archive, bulk harvesting of Commonwealth Government websites known the Australian Government Web Archive (AGWA) and annual legal deposit harvests of the entire .au web domain.
In addition, the National Library also partners with the Internet Archive to collect and preserve for long-term access selected Asia/Pacific websites related to specific events or socio-political groups.
Australian websites
The Australian Web Archive includes content from the following collections. All content is accessible through a single search service through Trove. Content can be searched by website URL or by keywords and phrases.
Websites are collected to the extent that resources and the technical constraints associated with capturing the content allow. Not all content can be collected especially where complex Javascript or other dynamic technologies are used by the original website to deliver content. In addition, media such as video may be missing and interactive elements such as forms will not function in the web archive.
The PANDORA Archive
Since 1996, the Library in collaboration with state libraries and other heritage organisations has been selecting, collecting and archiving copies of Australian web sites and online publications through a program know as the PANDORA Archive. The objective of this program is to ensure long-term access to this important form of Australia's documentary heritage. In recognition of its significance the PANDORA Archive was placed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Australian Register in August 2004.
Content ranges from single files, such as a text document in PDF, to large web sites, consisting of thousands of files in a variety of formats, including text, sound, image or video
In addition to government and academic publications, the Archive also includes sites representing cultural activity, Australia’s diverse peoples, community concerns, political activity such as election campaigns, sport, and many other topics.
Many titles are re-gathered on a regular basis to capture updated content and changes to the website that happen over time.
The Australian Government Web Archive (AGWA)
In March 2014 the National Library released a protoype web archive to make available bulk harvested collections of Commonwealth Government websites. The Library began regular (at least annual) harvests of Commonwealth Government websites in June 2011 under whole-of-government arrangements approved in May 2010. The Library continues to undertake bulk harvests of Commonwealth Government websites for the AGWA and all content is searchable through the Australian Web Archive by limiting searching to government domains.
Whole Australian (.au) domain collection
For a number of years the Library has been collecting snapshots (annual since 2005) and data from the entire .au top level country domain so as to collect a comprehensive representation of publishing on the Australian web domain. This content is not curated and represents publicly available websites as they were at the time of collecting.
Asia/Pacific websites
Since 2007 the Library, in partnership with the Internet Archive, has been selecting, collecting and archiving copies of Asia/Pacific websites through a service called Archive-It. The objective is to ensure long-term access to websites from the region related to significant events or socio-political groupings as an important resource for future researchers.
Content in the Archive is freely accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world, and is hosted by Archive-It.
Content may be found by searching the Library's online catalogue or via the listings on the Archived Websites pages for each county/region:
East Asia:
Southeast Asia:
Pacific: