The German National Library's web archive contains archival copies of websites on selected subjects, institutions or events. The German National Library also contributes to the cooperative website collections of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC).

German National Library's web archive

The German National Library’s legal collection mandate includes the collection, indexing and archiving of websites. Using an automated process known as web harvesting, we create snapshots of the websites, index them in our catalogue and archive them in our web archive.

We collect websites according to specific formal and content-related criteria. In our web archive, you will find the websites of federal authorities and universities, blogs, topics such as history, literature and music, and websites for events such as the federal elections or the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017. We create joint collections in collaboration with libraries obligated to maintain web archives at the regional level. One example of this is the Thuringia Web Archive.

Our web archive is structured by subject category and has a full-text search function. You can also access the content of our web archive through the catalogue.

On copyright grounds, it is usually only possible to access the collected websites in our reading rooms in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main. However, certain web archive content for which we have the right holder’s consent can also be used outside the reading rooms.

Archiving German-language Twitter

On 20 February 2023, an initiative launched by the Science Data Center for Literature and the German National Library issued a call for a concerted effort to download as many German-language Tweets as possible from the Twitter archive. The goal was to create as complete an archive of German-language Tweets as possible using a crowdsourcing initiative. The German National Library has made archive servers available to facilitate permanent storage. More

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Web archive of international thematic and event-based collections

The German National Library contributes to the cooperative collections of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). The IIPC’s member organisations collate websites on globally relevant topics such as climate change, the refugee crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, and on events such as European elections and the Olympic Games. The result is an international perspective on the latest events and the way in which they are depicted on the internet. These thematic collections are freely accessible from anywhere in the world.

Contact

Online publication service

np-info@dnb.de

Phone +49 341 2271-282