The first year of a webarchiving pilot at the National Széchényi Library, Budapest

Within the framework of the National Library Platform development project, that aims at a major restructuring of IT infrastructure and digital library service portfolio of the National Széchényi Library, a pilot project started in 2017 to develop the necessary infrastructure and the professional skills and competences of librarians required for harvesting the Hungarian public internet domain, as well as for establishing a system of long-term archiving of the harvested content. The pilot will be finished at the end of 2018. Unfortunately, we experienced a 20-year backlog of Hungary in this field. In the US, the Internet Archive started as early as 1996. Following its example, national, governmental or institutional web archives have been established in many countries, often with libraries and archives as coordinators or contributors. At the National Széchényi Library, the idea of web archiving initially appeared in the mid-2000’s, however, the necessary financial and professional conditions became available only in spring 2017. The current article is based on the plenary keynote lecture held at the Networkshop 2018 conference in Eger, and focuses on the experiences and results of the first year of the pilot (from April 2017 till April 2018).