Web harvesting enables the preservation of freely accessible Spanish digital serial publications.

The National Library of Spain, through the Spanish Web Archive, continues to work with the aim of saving as much cultural and documentary heritage on the Internet as possible.

Digital magazines are, without a doubt, among the most ephemeral types of content online. Every year, serial publications are continuously created and disappear, many of them without a print version, making them potentially unrecoverable content.

The National Library of Spain has carried out a project to detect magazines that disappeared between 2009 and 2023, with the goal of recovering their content and making it accessible to the public once again. This constitutes a highly valuable cultural heritage, especially in the scientific field and in official publications.

Thanks to the joint work of the Department of Serial Control and the Online Publications Deposit Service, more than 500 digital magazines have been recovered, with varying degrees of preservation. These contents are under active copyright protection, so they can only be accessed through the National Library of Spain catalogue, using secure computers available both at the National Library of Spain facilities and in the conservation centres of the autonomous communities. A full list of the recovered digital magazines, categorized by their degree of preservation, can be found at the following address: https://www.bne.es/es/colecciones/archivo-web-espanola/recolecciones-riesgo

The Importance of Massive Magazine Harvesting

Aware of the risk of losing this heritage, since 2020 the National Library of Spain has begun to massively and systematically preserve the websites of these digital publications, including the issues they contain. This enables their recovery in the event they disappear in the future. The process has been supported by information obtained from the catalogue, which is fully updated thanks to the work of the National Library of Spain as the National ISSN Center, responsible for registering all publications that receive this number.

This process will significantly increase the recovery rate of lost magazines, in contrast to those previously saved, which resulted from the harvesting of the .es domain or selective URLs. In 2024, the number of websites harvested containing digital serial publications has reached more than 9,000 titles, from which approximately 2.4 terabytes of data have been collected.

In this way, the National Library of Spain seeks to connect its technical tools and human resources in order to, with the help of publishers and producers, achieve the goal of preserving electronic serial publications, which until now had not been systematically archived. Secondly, the aim is to raise awareness of the benefits that digital publication preservation offers—not only for publishers and researchers, but also for citizens in general—as a way to safeguard a very important part of Spain’s cultural and scientific heritage.