This presentation focuses on the research project PROMISE (PReserving Online Multiple Information: toward a Belgian StratEgy) which is financed by the Belgian Science Policy Office (Belspo) as part of the BRAIN.be program.The overall aim of the project is to set up a long-term webarchiving strategy at the federal level for Belgium. The State Archives, the Royal Library (KBR), the universities of Ghent (Research Group for Media, Innovation and Communication Technologies; Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities) and Namur (Research Centre in Information, Law and Society) and the university college Bruxelles-Brabant (Unité de Recherche et de Formation en Sciences de l’Information et de la Documentation) are partners in the project. Its goals are to 1) identify best practices in the field of web archiving, 2) develop a Belgian web archiving policy, 3) pilot the Belgian webarchive and 4) make recommendations for a sustainable web archiving service in Belgium.

The first part of the presentation will focus on the background of the PROMISE project and web archiving policies.An overview of the selection and access policies to web archives managed by other national archives and libraries abroad will be presented. The focus will then shift to Belgium and the strategy envisioned by KBR and the State Archives will be discussed. This strategy is based on the OAIS model. Furthermore, the lessons learnt will also be presented.

The envisioned strategy is also strongly influenced by the legal framework. One important question that was studied within the project is how the ‘Belgian web’ can be defined. Copyright is another important aspect as it influences both the selection and access policies for the web archive managed by KBR and the State Archives. The difficulty of translating the legal framework into feasible operational guidelines will also be discussed.

The various technical solutions chosen as part of PROMISE will be presented: from the stage of selecting resources to archive (websites, web pages, etc.), to adding metadata, to the process of archiving those resources and making them available to the public. The quality control for web archives is also an important matter, so different methods to automate this task will be presented and discussed.

To conclude: this presentation will focus on the operational aspects of establishing a Belgian federal web archive, the technical set-up and the legal aspects that need to be taken into account.