Preservation of the Ekka website in Pandora

It’s that time of year again…and the State Library of Queensland will again be capturing and archiving the website of the Royal Queensland Show – the Ekka.

For the past few years the State Library has captured a copy of the Ekka website.  This is achieved through the State Library’s participation in the PANDORA – Australia’s web archive.  PANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia) is a collaborative undertaking, with ten Australian cultural collecting organisations contributing to the archive.  The State Library has been an active participant in PANDORA since 2002, each year adding hundreds of Queensland online publications and websites to the archive.

How does this work?  Web-based software is used, which enables the download and storage of websites in PANDORA.  The copies of the websites are as far as is technically possible identical to the live version at the time of the capture.  Thus they exist as a snapshot of the website in time.

Each year of course, the Ekka website changes, and snapshots of the Ekka website have been successfully archived for 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.  Once the 2008 site is captured, it too will be added to the archive.  The preserved Ekka websites are freely available to anyone with access to the internet at http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-32558

The Ekka has a long and proud past, and the Ekka website forms part of its documentary history.  It’s reassuring to know that through the State Library’s efforts, the Ekka web presence, an important part of Australia’s web heritage, is being preserved for posterity and will be available for future generations of researchers.