The German National Library plans to significantly expand its web archive in the medium term. Because it is not possible to archive the entire “German web”, due to the volatility of the medium and the sheer volume of content, a selection of websites to be collected must be made.
The paper “Relevance and Diversity – Towards Selection Criteria for Archiving the German Web”, recently published in LIBER Quarterly 36 (2026), introduces the concept of selecting “exemplary diversity” and outlines the initial steps towards its operationalisation.
The long-term aim is to identify methods for the (semi-)automatic design of the selection process that ensure good coverage of both relevance and diversity.
