Portuguese Web Archive

Welcome to the Tomba project: the Portuguese web archive

Publishing tools, such as Blogger, enabled people with limited technical skills to become web publishers. Never before in the history of mankind so much information was published. However, it was never so ephemeral. Web documents such as news, blogs or discussion forums are valuable descriptions of our times, but most of them will not last longer than one year.

If we do not archive the current web contents, the future generations could witness an information gap in our days.

The Internet Archive collects and stores contents from the world-wide web. However, it is difficult for a single organization to archive the web exhaustively while satisfying all needs, because the web is permanently changing and many contents disappear before they can be archived.

As a result, several countries are creating their own national archives to ensure the preservation of contents of historical relevance to their cultures.

Portugal is now beginning its national web archiving initiative with the Tomba project at FCCN (National Foundation for Scientific Computing).