Arquivo.pt at the IIPC Web Archiving Conference in Brussels

The Arquivo.pt team attended the Web Archiving Conference (WAC) and the IIPC General Assembley in Brussels from April 20 to 23, 2026.

The Web Archiving Conference is the largest event dedicated to Internet preservation. It brings together initiatives from around the world, such as the Internet Archive, national libraries, and research centers that develop methodologies for using historical web content.

The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) is a consortium that seeks to bring together various web archiving initiatives, coordinating efforts to maintain and develop standards, tools, collections, and training.

The Belgian Web Archive

The KBR (De Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België), the Belgian National Library, located in the heart of Brussels, hosted the Web Archiving Conference, which drew approximately 250 participants. The conference’s opening session featured a presentation of the results and the conclusion of the pilot project for the Belgian Web Archive.

In 2017, Belgium launched a project called PROMISE ((PReserving Online Multiple Information: towards a Belgian Strategy) for the national Web archive. Starting in 2019, with funding from the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO), a five-year pilot phase was conducted, culminating in the presentation of a web archive prototype in 2026. Partners in this project included the national archives, the State Archives of Belgium (AGR), and, on the research side, the Ghent University

The collection of Belgian web content was carried out under the existing legal deposit system for printed materials, which was adapted in December 2016 to include digital web content.

The PROMISE project used open-source tools shared by the IIPC community (for data collection, the Browsertrix-crawler from Webrecorder.net; for playback, the pywb software). Access to the content is restricted and limited to the library system, and the collection has been enriched with metadata and catalog information.