Most national media archives today work under a legal deposit law that has outdated itself. In a time when the materiality of media has dispersed into bits and bytes, national media archives keep on collecting material items put out on the old market. In Sweden, for instance, the lack of a legal deposit law for the web has led to a cumbersome situation, where the archived cultural heritage does not correspond to the actual media landscape. The current situation, in fact, resembles circumstances audiovisual media faced a hundred years ago. Around 1900 archivists were also neglecting phonographs and film. It was deemed low culture and unpreservable, even if some archivists’ must have realised that media modernity was on its way.

From a national archival perspective the most complicated question regarding the Internet is what a digital media object actually is? Where is for example radio on the web – and when? Is computerbased radio – or television – the streaming files, or does other media material as text belong to the actual medium? My own archive, the SLBA, believe there is only one way to tackle the current situation. Shift media assemblage strategies from a law based platform, towards active selection by archives themselves. Let national media archives decide what material to assemble. Hence, in close dialogue with representatives from the academic community, national media archives need to become active institutions and collect media material they deem interesting on the Internet – and consciously leave other material out.