The project aims at creating a comprehensive archive documenting the rise of the Internet, capturing its sociological and cultural aspects as society moves into the information age. To achieve this, we use bulk collection primarily, gathering all accessible data from the Austrian web-space.
Therefore, the scope covers the whole .at-domain, but also servers located in Austria, yet registered under "foreign" domains (e.g. .com, .org, .cc, .tv) are included. Furthermore, sites dedicated to topics of Austrian interest as well as sites about Austria (so-called "Austriaca") are considered even if they are physically located in another country. Austrian representations in a foreign country like http://www.austrian-embassy.hu/, or the Austrian Cultural Institute in New York, USA, at http://www.aci.org/ are examples for such sites of interest. For the time being, we select the latter types of sources manually, in absence of methods that are capable of discerning these sites automatically.
Apart from those rather infrequent snapshots of the Austrian web-space, we plan to set up a framework for flexible projects, that have a rather small scope, but at the same time allow more frequent capturing of the sites. Initiated ad-hoc, those temporary projects cover selected portions of the whole web-space that undergo an increased production of material on a specific topic caused by an extraordinary event (cf. Section 2.2.2). Such situations calling for a more focused monitoring could be national elections, art symposia, festivals, or any topic arousing emotional and wide-spread public debate.
Long-term preservation of the acquired material demands, of course, special consideration. However, this is not a core issue of the current phase the AOLA-project is in. Yet, further stages are going to tackle this serious challenge thoroughly, with respect to up-to-date research. Current activities in this field (cf. Section 2.4) suggest a combination of the Conversion and the Emulation-strategy.
In this phase of the AOLA-project, no access can be granted to the archive. Yet, we plan to give access limited to researchers, historians and scholars in the scope of specific, approved projects. Ultimately, we have in mind to open the archive for the general public. However, access provision requires an appropriate legal framework. The latest revision of the Austrian Deposit Law in July 2000 included off-line electronic media such as CD-ROMs. Yet, despite rising awareness in governmental departments of the forthcoming "digital culture" [AB00], there is currently no regulation for on-line publications.