About HAW

The Croatian Web Archive (HAW) is a collection of content archived from the web for the purpose of archiving and permanently storing online legal deposit copy. Content on the web is a significant part of contemporary Croatian cultural and scientific heritage. It is built on the concepts of selective archiving, annual crawl of the .hr domain and thematic crawls of content of national importance.

Croatian Web Archive (HAW) is part of the Digital Collections of the National and University Library in Zagreb.

Publishers are legally bound to deliver to the National and University Library in Zagreb a legal deposit copy of a resource published online. In turn, the Library is legally bound to collect, process, store and provide access to the resources. The Croatian Legal Deposit Regulations (NN 66/2020) specify requirements regarding the deposit, formats, terms of use and protection of online resources and publications, as well as the terms of access to such material.

HAW uses the DAMP-based software customized by the University of Zagreb’s Computing Center (SRCE), by which copies are archived in their original format and in a way that they can be used in the future. Also, in carrying out regular national web domain crawls and crawls targeting specific content, it uses a version of the Heritrix free software customised by Srce.

Check out HAW’s flyer.

Selective archiving

Selective archiving on the web is a process that involves creating a bibliographic description, permanent storing and making archived publications available. Copies of such publications are also available in the NSK online catalog. Search is available in the “Search HAW” search engine by title, URL and keywords. Advanced search is available here.

Annual .hr domain crawl

HAW crawls publicly available content from the Croatian web space (entire .hr domain) once a year and saves it to the server. Search is available in the “Search .hr domain” search engine by entering a full URL.

Thematic collections

HAW periodically crawls selected content from the web relating to current topics or events of national importance. The most relevant subject matter is selected. Browse them here.

HAW timeline

2017

Assignment of a permanent URN:NBN identifier for all titles and archived copies begins.

2012

HAW’s metadata available at Europeana.

2011

HAW begins with the annual crawl of the .hr domain and building thematic collections.

2010

The Digital Archive of Croatian Online Publications is renamed to the Croatian Web Archive. The new name more accurately describes HAW’s purpose and purpose of archived content from the web. Also, it is consistent with the names of the web archives of other national libraries.

2004

NSK, in collaboration with SRCE, is establishing a Digital Archive of Croatian Online Publications – DAMP in order to collect and preserve the online part of Croatian publishing production.

1998

NSK begins cataloging online publications.

1997

For the first time, the Act on Libraries requires that online publications are part of the legal deposit.