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National Library Planning New Zealand 2010 Web Harvest

The New Zealand National Library are planning the 2010 web harvest for April 2010.

The web harvest is the libraries way of attempting to preserve a historic copy of the .nz domain space.

The last harvest was in 2008 where the library harvested more than 100 million URLs, causing issues for many website owners.

This year, the National Library is requesting feedback on their planned 2010 harvest.

We are seeking feedback on options the Library has identified to address the concerns raised during the 2008 harvest, specifically:

Notification: The harvest was initiated without prior notification to affected parties.

Robots policy: The harvester was configured to ignore the robots.txt convention unless the website owner contacted the Library to request that it be honoured.

Location of the harvester: The harvest was operated by the Internet Archive from the United Sates, and some website owners are charged more for international traffic.

We are working hard to improve our communications for the 2010 web harvest, and hope to work with site owners, administrators and other stakeholders to lessen the impact of our harvesting activity.

Source: http://www.natlib.govt.nz/about-us/current-initiatives/web-harvest-2010

The time line set out by the National Library is as follows

• January – Consultation with stakeholder groups
• February – Technical planning
• March – Communication and notifications about the upcoming harvest
• April – The harvest

If you would like to contribute feedback on the 2010 web harvest, Head over to the National Library website and download the New Zealand Web Harvest 2010 Options Paper.

Submissions close 9am Monday 8th February 2010.