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Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 24 February 2021

Wednesday, 24 February 2021

Questions (254)

Rose Conway-Walsh

Question:

254. Deputy Rose Conway-Walsh asked the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media if she plans to introduce legislation to enable the development of systematic web archiving on a legal deposit basis; her views on the need for such an archive for Ireland’s national research infrastructure; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [10328/21]

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Written answers

In Ireland, Section 29 of the Copyright and Other Intellectual Property Law Provisions Act 2019 (the 2019 Act) introduces a provision for copyright libraries to request a publisher to deposit a copy of a digital publication first published in the State. This introduced digital legal deposit in Ireland. Allied to that is the challenge of archiving the web and the difficulties of collecting, preserving and providing access to information as digital content grows at an unprecedented rate. Since 2011, as part of its mission is to collect, protect and make available the recorded memory of Ireland, the National Library of Ireland (NLI), has selectively archived the web, moving toward the creation of an archive of Irish websites. Web archiving is the process of “harvesting” portions of the web and preserving the collections in an archival format to ensure it remains accessible in the future. The harvested sites are preserved sometimes long after the original site has disappeared. An archived website is fully functioning and can be navigated like a live website.

The NLI’s web archiving activity since 2011 has collected websites of important events in Irish life. The collection includes inter alia websites such as government websites, websites for sporting events, festivals, elections, referenda and websites of political parties. The archived website or social media account forms part of the national collection and are available at https://www.nli.ie/en/udlist/web-archive-collections.aspx.

The NLI identifies websites and social media accounts for inclusion in its web archive in line with the Library’s collection development policy. The public is encouraged to recommend websites through a nomination form on the website. As web-archiving in Ireland is by notification, website and social media account owners are notified of the NLI's intent to include them in the web archive. They can decline at any point to being included in the web archive. Sites are collected by a ‘web crawler’ which is a piece of automated software designed to capture websites at a particular point in time. The crawler downloads code, images, documents and other files that are essential to reproducing the website and its contents so that it is as similar to its original form as possible. Allied to this, my Department is working with the NLI on a report exploring the feasibility of expanding the NLI’s capacity to establish a digital legal deposit scheme to serve as a web archive for the .ie domain.

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