Members of the Common Crawl Foundation team (Laurie Burchell, Sebastian Nagel, and Pedro Ortiz Suarez) attended the 2026 IIPC Web Archiving Conference (WAC) and General Assembly (GA) held at KBR, the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels.

Royal Library of Belgium, picture by EmDee CC BY-SA 4.0

Themes for this year's conference consisted of Access & Research Use, Tools & Infrastructure, Collection Development, Legal & Ethical Issues, Policies & Standards, and Environmental Impact. In accordance with that last theme, participants were asked to use the stairs over the elevators.

Common Crawl Contributions

‍Common Crawl was well represented across the event, with both presentations and references in the work of other participants.

Sebastian Nagel, Laurie Burchell, and Pedro Ortiz Suarez.

Work on improved language identification for crawl data was presented by Laurie.  Pedro presented statistics on data-access methods used to download Common Crawl data and showcased cc-downloader adoption over the last year, with Sebastian presenting the research on Web crawling policies and opt-outs at the General Assembly done in collaboration with CCF.  Presentations are expected to be posted to the IIPC YouTube channel in the near future.

Sebastian Nagel presenting CCBot

Common Crawl’s data products were often referenced, both during talks and behind the scenes, notable mentions include the “Responsible Strategies” session by Abbie Grotke, "End of Term Web Archive: Harmonizing WARC contributions from multiple crawling partner" presented by Mark Phillips, and "Crawl, cloud, carbon: measuring and reducing emissions for web archivists" by Simon Ponsford.

We look forward to more discussions with our friends (new and old) from the IIPC in the near future.

Laurie Burchell presenting CommonLID at Howest

Closing panel: Web Archiving for Accountability, shown from left to right: Emily Tripp, Marvin Milatz, Friedhelm Weinberg, Basile Simon