The mission of PADICAT is to harvest, to process and to provide access to digital heritage of Catalonia born on the Internet.

It is a system based on the implementation of several software that allow web pages to be collected, stored, organized, preserved and permanently accessed.

PADICAT objectives are:

• Massive compilation of .cat domain.
• Systematic archiving of the web site production of Catalan organizations and companies.
• Promote lines of research through themed integration of digital resources related to specific events in Catalan public life, like political campaigns on the Internet, online music phenomenon, or museums on the Internet.

After its birth (2005-2006), growth (2007-2008) and consolidation (2009-2011) phases, since 2012 is wanted to systematize its capacity for growth, with the goal of incorporating 75.700 versions of about 32.000 web sites per year, from:

• A biannual compilation from 30.000 domain .cat resources.
• A biannual compilation from 550 resources from 450 organizations with a cooperation agreement.
• A biannual compilation from 800 resources that users have recommended.
• A compilation from 1.000 monographic collection resources.
• A daily compilation from a substantial part of 30 online serial publications.

In addition, there are four permanent work areas:

• Defining preservation strategies for the digital heritage born on the Internet. PADICAT provides periodic reports about Catalan web sites; it detects which formats are having illegibility problems; and identifies the most used languages, etc.
• Promoting lines of research by creating monographic collections with involvement of experts from every subject.
• Creating and maintaining a digital serials archive through the systematized capture of digital serials of Internet. Now, it consists of a representative sample about the kind and contents, selected among born digital, without analogical equivalent.
• Cooperating with other web archives, libraries, archives and museums, for giving an efficient answer to challenges on digital preservation and access into its resources.