When someone calls up a single webpage in a digital archive, it’s difficult to understand the scope of the collection. To improve the visibility and appreciation of its resources, the Internet Archive Europe partnered with software engineers and the Internet Archive to develop an interactive display that gives users a sense of what all is available at their fingertips.
This fall, an installation was unveiled in the Netherlands and later demonstrated by Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle at the October 22 celebration in San Francisco.
https://display.archive.org/nl
“The idea is to be able to show and play with the breadth that people have accomplished and the depth that we have all built together,” Kahle said. “This is the web we built. This is the web that we want. This is the web we want to make go from 1 trillion to 2 trillion to 3 trillion.”
The initial display included screenshots of more than 85,000 Dutch websites preserved over the past 30 years. Visitors to the National Library in the Netherlands used a physical joystick and buttons to explore a variety of webpages in a game-like experience. With their voices, they can direct the machine to zoom in on specific topics or domains. The screenshots are laid out in a semantic grid, where websites with similar topics appear together in a cluster. Both topics and layout are extracted using AI–based tools (VLM, embeddings).
The idea started with Kai Jauslin in 2020 when he was working with the Swiss National Library to help the public visualize its digital collection. Jauslin, a software engineer and owner of Nextension.com, https://www.nextension.com/ and Barbara Signori, a digital librarian, created an interactive display that went live in 2021, reflecting 80,000 snapshots of archived web pages in the Swiss library collection. (It has since grown to more than 115,000.)
[See a demonstration in this You Tube video]
Once Kahle saw the Swiss project, he was interested in developing something similar using the Wayback Machine. In January, Jauslin got the green light to make the project open source so he could reuse everything he’d developed for the Swiss library for the Internet Archive Europe. He then collaborated with a team at the Internet Archive including Jefferson Bailey, director of archiving and data services.
“One of the goals of this project was to be able to show the depth [of the collection] and how big everything is,” Jauslin said.
Bailey extracted the data, made over 1 million screenshots, created formatting to adapt the project framework to feature webpages from the Netherlands collection. The screenshots were used in the interface backed by the Wayback Machine.
“This showcases these collections and makes them more tangible and usable in different ways,” Bailey said. “It’s not just looking at the archive copy of one website, but looking at all of them and searching across categories. You can zoom in and zoom out with functionality that was not available before. It showcases these collections. “
In addition to being a cool tech project, Bailey said, the display has an advocacy element in helping demonstrate the value and scope of digital collections. The display is a good “public engagement” opportunity that lets library patrons interact and grasp the scale of the available resources.
The visibility is a useful tool in making the case to funders and the government to support open resources and library preservation.
At the National Library of the Netherlands, Sophie Ham, curator of the digital collection, said the display shows that life on the internet is worth preserving.
[See story at the Sept. 2025 event in the Netherlands on the display:https://www.internetarchive.eu/2025/09/18/preserving-digital-sovereignty-reflections-on-brewster-kahles-intervention-at-the-kb/]
“We were very enthusiastic about this concept [of the display] because our web archive is very hidden. People barely know it’s there,” Ham said. “We need people to acknowledge the importance of a web archive – but to acknowledge it, you have to make it visible and more attractive.”
The display made the collection visible, she said, and the low-barrier, interactive element has been embraced by visitors.
“It helps us get into people’s mind that web archives are as important as books in collections of national libraries,” Ham said.
As technology advances, Jauslin said he hopes the project will continue to expand; Bailey added the hope is to customize the display to other national libraries that express interest.