Although the .be domain was introduced in June 1988, the Belgian web is currently not
systematically archived. As of August 2016, 1.550.147 domains are registered by DNS Belgium.
Without a Belgian web archive, the content of these websites will not be preserved for future
generations and a significant portion of Belgian history will be lost forever. In this paper we present the initial findings of a research project exploring the policy, legal, technical and scientific issues around archiving the Belgian web. The aim of this project is to a) identify current best practices in web-archiving b) pilot a Belgian web archive and c) identify research use cases for the scientific study of the Belgian web. This case study is seen as a first step towards implementing a long-term web archiving strategy for Belgium