The Archives of the Present 2. Dezember, 16.30 Archivo di Stato di Milano, Via Senato 10 Archiving the Web Sites of Political Parties in Germany A Joint Project of the Archives of Political Foundations Funded by the DFG Rudolf Schmitz Archiv der sozialen Demokratie/ FES For the purpose of this project, which has been funded by the German Research Foundation, the archives of five political foundations in Germany have joined forces; these archives being the Archive of Social Democracy of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Archive for Christian Democratic Policy of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Archive for Christian Social Policy of the Hanns Seidel Foundation, the Archive of Liberalism of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and the Archive'Grünes Gedächtnis' of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. In the course of the project, which is scheduled to take two years, we envisage not only creating new Internet archives but also developing exemplary procedures that can be adapted by others. In the process of optimising the electronic backup of political parties' Internet presence, all archives can rely on the long-term experience of the archive of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which heads the project. As early as 1999, the Archive of Social Democracy decided to tackle the challenge of archiving the Internet presence of the Social Democratic party in order to save this new source category permanently and make it available for research. In preparation for the DFG project, which started last September, the different archives succeeded in finding a common approach for the recording or –as we call it- the mirroring of websites and the presentation of the archived websites. These common approaches, as well as the similarity of the task, were the real basis for the cooperation between the archives. Before I present the Internet archive to you, please allow me to say a few words on three important aspects of this project: the task, the process of mirroring and the form of presentation. First of all, the task: Archiving the Internet presence of the Social Democratic party can only mean archiving the websites of the statutory committees, groupings and initiatives of the SPD. This is also true for their parliamentary groups. Therefore, it is not our intention-and there is no point in doing so- to completely document the SPD’s appearance on the web with its infinite discussions on