The web archive Snapshot of Japan 2016-2018 was an experiment in a "snapshot" approach to archiving websites. It aimed to provide a glimpse at this three-year period by preserving a wide range of issues deemed critical for future scholars to understand contemporary society. Websites were selected after a review of current trends in Japanese studies and attending to reoccurring themes in various media outlets. The sites that were chosen represented a variety of institutional types, were actively updated, had some geographical dispersion over Japan, and fell outside of other web archiving efforts. The general and sub-categories are listed below.