National web archives compared: who collects, under what law, and who can see it

Two models: legal deposit and permission

Some countries extend legal deposit, the duty to give copies of publications to a national library, to websites. The UK did so through regulations made on 5 April 2013, which came into force the next day ². They let a deposit library request online works by means of a web harvester ². France's BnF says the DADVSI law of 1 August 2006 brought the web into its legal deposit mission ¹⁰.

Other libraries rely on notice or permission. The Library of Congress says it operates in a permissions-based environment. It must at minimum notify site owners, or obtain explicit permission, depending on the country and content category ³. US government sites and sites under Creative Commons or similar terms are exempt from the notice rule ³. Japan's National Diet Library collects public bodies under the National Diet Library Act and other sites only with the publisher's permission ⁷.

Side by side

United Kingdom rules in detail

The deposit libraries named in the 2013 regulations are the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Cambridge University Library and the Library of Trinity College Dublin ².

A work counts as published in the UK if it is on a website whose domain name relates to the UK or a place in it, or if the publisher's activities take place in the UK ². A work is not covered if access is only available to people outside the UK ². The regulations say only one computer terminal may give readers access to the same material at any one time ².

The British Library says its SHINE service gives searchable access to .uk websites from 1996 to 2013, originally acquired by JISC from the Internet Archive ¹.

United States, France, Canada and Japan

The Library of Congress collects House and Senate offices back to the 107th Congress in 2003 ³. It harvests all Judicial Branch websites, collects the Executive Branch selectively and does not systematically collect state websites ³.

The BnF says the number of domains it collected rose from 0.9 million in 2007 to 5.8 million in 2022, about 60% of the French web ¹⁰. Access is open to anyone who can justify academic, professional or personal research. Holders of a research pass consult it in BnF research reading rooms, on library computers or through the AVEC application, and regional legal deposit libraries and partner libraries offer access under their own conditions ⁴.

Library and Archives Canada says its archive holds historical official publications, statistics and data of the Government of Canada, and offers curated thematic collections ⁵. The NDL lets users filter WARP results by whether a capture is viewable online or only inside the library ⁷.

Other national archives

The International Internet Preservation Consortium lists national members from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. They include the National Library Board Singapore, the National Library of China, the National Library of Korea, the National Library of New Zealand, the Royal Danish Library, the Portuguese Web Archive and Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt ⁸.

The IIPC members page did not list a member institution from India, South Africa or Brazil when read in November 2026 ⁸. In those countries the Internet Archive's general crawls may be the main public record of older pages, and its crawls tend to find well linked sites ⁹.