Website of PADICAT renewed to increase participation and facilitate access to the Web Archive of Catalonia

09-09-2011

The inauguration of the new version, that provides open access to 44.000 websites of Catalan companies and institutions, coincides with the National Day of Catalonia

The National Library of Catalonia, (Biblioteca de Catalunya) has renewed the website of PADICAT (Digital Heritage of Catalonia), coinciding with the fifth anniversary of its inauguration on September 11, 2006.
 

The new website wants to increase the participation of users and facilitate access to the Web Archive of Catalonia, which provides open access to 44,374 Internet websites of the Catalan Internet.
 

The new portal, featuring on its cover examples from the holdings of PADICAT, has simplified its structure into three sections: "Search and Discover", "Collaborate and participate", and "About us", in order to promote the use of the digital collection, formed by old versions of web pages of Catalonia. The new version seeks the involvement of users in the recommendation of web resources which may be part of the Digital Heritage of Catalonia. In five years PADICAT crawled 704 websites recommended by users.
 

The cover of the new website contains testimonies of experts in digital culture and information society, as the director of Catalan digital journal Vilaweb.cat, Mr. Vicenç Partal; the journalist Ms. Roberta Bosco; the founder of Infonomia.com, Mr. Alfons Cornella; or the Dean of the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Barcelona, Dr. Cristóbal Urbano.
 

The renewal of the web resource has had the collaboration of the PADICAT technology partner sited in Barcelona, the Center for Academic and Scientific Services of Catalonia (CESCA); and the companies Optimyzet and Ymbra.
 

The PADICAT repository contains 195.547 old versions of 44.374 websites of companies and institutions, media or blogs. In total, 300 million computer files that occupy 10 terabytes of space.
 

The National Library of Catalonia, member of the International Consortium for the Preservation of the Internet, has compiled in the PADICAT repository the electoral campaigns with incidence in Catalonia, the web resources of Museums of Catalonia, or the phenomenon of the folk-rock music on the Internet. It has also signed cooperation agreements with 450 institutions (companies, professional associations, universities and associations of all kinds) to guarantee long-term preservation of the pages that are published on the Internet.
 

Thanks to a collaboration agreement with the Foundation puntCAT, PADICAT periodically captures all digital resources of the Internet under the domain. cat.