The PADICAT repository (Digital Heritage of Catalonia) contains the digital resources of the electoral campaigns on the Internet since 2006.

The last elections in USA have proved the importance of web pages and digital resources in the electoral campaigns. The websites of the political parties, candidates’ blogs, institutional and mass media webs already are an indissociable part of these processes. But, as the rest of web pages, lifetime of these kind of resources is ephemeral. They change daily and some of them even disappear once the electoral campaign has finished.

The Biblioteca de Catalunya, together with the national libraries of Germany, UK, Austria, Denmark, France, Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as with other IIPC members, have agreed to carry out a joint project in collaboration to harvest a selection of web pages from the electoral campaign to the European Parliament to guarantee its future preservation.

The Padicat repository, led by the Biblioteca de Catalunya, and supported by CESCA (Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya) and the Secretaria de Telecomunicacions i Societat de la Informació de la Generalitat de Catalunya, has initiate the capture of web pages containing information about these next european elections. As the Director of the Biblioteca de Catalunya, Dolors Lamarca, said “it’s a question of assuring the retrieval of these digital resources once the electoral campaign on the Interenet has finished, as we have done with the electoral campaigns on the Internet to the Parlament de Catalunya (2006), local elections (2007), and the Spain general elections (2008)”. Lamarca has added: “this year, together with the rest of european national libraries, we are creating the future web archive of Europe”.

This alliance of 8 european national libraries will allow to carry out a systematic monitoring of the several digital resources belonging to political parties and candidates running to be elected in the european elections. Thus, the electoral campaign on the Internet will get incorporated to the repository of the Biblioteca de Catalunya, which is dedicated to harvest, process and spread the web pages created in Catalonia, or about Catalonia.