The Austrian On-Line Archive (AOLA)19 is an initiative to lay the foundations for a permanent archive of the Austrian web-space. Cooperatively the Austrian National Library (OeNB)20 and the Department of Software Technology and Interactive Systems at the Vienna University of Technology took first steps in this field.
After preparatory work commencing already in 1999, we launched a pilot project in the year 2000. Initially, we analysed strategical and technical aspects concerning the acquisition of the material. Beginning with Spring 2001, we scrutinised two different tools for acquiring the material from the open-access web in practice making snapshots of the Austrian web-space.
In the following, the goals of the AOLA-project are outlined in Section 4.1. Subsequently, the system configuration as it was when performing test runs is described (cf. Section 4.3). Our first two experiments with making a snapshot of the whole Austrian web-space are detailed, first, using the Nedlib-crawler in Section 4.4 and then the other run using the Combine-robot in Section 4.5. The primary goal to perform those was to test the different tools and to gain experience. For a closer discussion on web-crawlers, the very tools used, refer to the paragraph on Bulk Collection in Section 2.2.2.