PADICAT

PADICAT acronym for Patrimoni Digital de Catalunya, in Catalan; or Digital Heritage of Catalonia, in English, is the Web Archive of Catalonia. Created in 2005 by the Biblioteca de Catalunya, the public institution responsible for collecting, preserving and distributing the bibliographic heritage, and the digital heritage by extension. Has the technological collaboration of the Center for Scientific and Academic Services of Catalonia, (CESCA) for preserving and giving access to old versions of web pages published on the Internet. The Biblioteca de Catalunya, as the responsible of PADICAT, is member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). PADICAT was born in 2005 following the trend of other national libraries on web archives creation, and as an answer to the publication of the guidelines for the preservation of digital heritage by the UNESCO. There are many web archives running. The most famous began in 1996: the Swedish Kulturarw3; the Australian Pandora, and the most popular repository, Internet Archive. The analysis of these and other projects, made way to the planning of PADICAT project, following the common trend around the world of a hybrid model of functioning, complementing the regular capture of a whole geographical domain (.cat domain in this case), with selective actions, and expand these coverage to different social events that generate an intense activity in the network (electoral campaigns, for instance) or with thematic packages (museums of Catalonia, Catalan folk-rock on the web, etc.). PADICAT complements all this with users contributions through the recommended webs. In June 2005, the Biblioteca de Catalunya started the preliminary phase, of planning, in which a projects analysis was performed about existing resources, agents involved in production of web pages of Catalonia and legal issues that determine practices that want to do. Based on parameters defined by the Biblioteca de Catalunya, on July 21, 2006, began to collect automatically websites likely to be part of the digital heritage of Catalonia.