The space at which electronic content is being published and the sheer size of data involved have contributed to the buildup of a heritage we are called upon to collect and preserve. As a consequence, and in line with UNESCO’s recommendations about archiving the digital heritage, a web archiving unit was set up within NLT because the very nature of digital documents requires serious solutions to prevent their disappearance from the web.

The Web and Electronic Resource Archiving Unit was set up in late 2016. There was an urgent need to set up such a unit due to the rapid buildup of data and resources fed into the internet and to the fact that, contrary to paper documents, they may be withdrawn, edited or moved around.

Because the conservation function within the National Library is based essentially on individual intellectual and literary production, it was agreed to focus on the opinion pages in the various web pages, social media, electronic newspapers, and private websites,to process their content, store them electronically and make them accessible to researchers. With regard to social media, a number of accounts managed by opinion makers were selected. In addition, the web archiving unit also keeps:

- Caricatures

- Catalogued photos of political, social, and cultural events

- Videos of various events

- Official documents (Statements, statistics, surveys…)

In 2019, as part of the Alliance for documenting the Tunisian revolution, the National Library contributed its holdings of archived digital documents to the exhibit “Five Minutes to Fourteen, Tunisia’s Instant”. During the 2020 total COVID-19 lockdown, the unit archived the electronic forums posted on the web (142 forums). Digital archiving is open to broad vistas for rapid development. Hence, efforts during the next few years should be more professional due to the rapid development of the methodologies and techniques used in collecting, processing, preserving materials and in making them available.