What kinds of websites can I find in Webarchiv.cz?

Webarchiv.cz collects Czech web resources and keeps them accessible long term, so you can find sites that no longer exist on the live web. The strongest coverage for a general visitor is local and regional memory: town and village history, heritage, associations, and cultural events. If you are looking for a small local site that has disappeared, this is the kind of material the archive is built to preserve.

Types of websites you can expect

The archive's own examples show the pattern clearly:

• Town history sites — e.g. Stará Jihlava, a site about the history of Jihlava with historical photographs, articles, and old maps. It can now only be found in the archive.
• Village history sites — e.g. Historie obce Sobíňov, a detailed history of a village in the Vysočina region, online until around 2017. It includes historical photographs and describes parts of the village, its buildings, landmarks, and inhabitants.
• Local heritage and community memory — the archive frames websites themselves as part of cultural memory, noting that much information about local traditions, heritage sites, associations, and cultural events now exists only in digital form. Smaller local sites get particular attention because they are often the first to vanish from the internet.

Beyond these examples, the archive also holds contracted websites across other topics. Recent contracts listed include Spirituality Studies Revue, Turistické informační centrum Vyškov, Nový Vyškov, Magazín Živá univerzita, and Centrum infekčních nemocí zvířat — so the scope is not limited to local history.

How to find something

Use the archive's own navigation rather than guessing at URLs:

1. Browse — the site offers a browse function for moving through what is held.
2. Topic collections — organized groupings that help you find material by subject instead of by exact site name.
3. Nominate a site — if the site you want is missing, you can propose it for archiving.

A practical search pattern: start with the place name or topic (e.g. a town or village), check topic collections first, then try the site name directly. Expect that some sites are reachable only through the archive because the original is gone.

What to keep in mind

• Offline does not mean unavailable. Sites like Stará Jihlava and Historie obce Sobíňov are described as no longer findable online but still present in the archive.
• Coverage is selective, not total. The archive reports 4,769 contracts with publishers and 740 TB of data as of 09/23/2026, with the first website harvested on 3 September 2001. That is a large but curated collection, so a given site may or may not be included.
• Small local sites are both the priority and the hardest to catch — they disappear first, which is exactly why they are singled out.

If your interest is a Czech town, village, or local heritage site that has gone offline, Webarchiv.cz is a reasonable first place to look. If it is not there, the nomination option is the direct way to ask for it.