AP: “British Library Sets to Archive the Web”

From the Associated Press:

Capturing the unruly, ever-changing Internet is like trying to pin down a raging river.
But the British Library is going to try.
For centuries the library has kept a copy of every book, pamphlet, magazine and newspaper published in Britain. Starting Saturday, it will also be bound to record every British website, e-book, online newsletter and blog in a bid to preserve the nation’s “digital memory.”
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“Stuff out there on the Web is ephemeral,” said Lucie Burgess, the library’s head of content strategy. “The average life of a web page is only 75 days, because websites change, the contents get taken down.
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Like reference collections around the world, the British Library has been attempting to archive the Web for years in a piecemeal way and has collected about 10,000 sites. Until now, though, it has had to get permission from website owners before taking a snapshot of their pages.
That began to change with a law passed in 2003, but it has taken a decade of legislative and technological preparation for the library to be ready to begin a vast trawl of all sites ending with the suffix .uk.
An automated web harvester will scan and record 4.8 million sites, a total of 1 billion web pages. Most will be captured once a year, but hundreds of thousands of fast-changing sites such as those of newspapers and magazines will be archived as often as once a day.
The library plans to make the content publicly available by the end of this year.

Read the Complete Article
See Also: Web Archiving (via The British Library)
Includes info about legal deposit of UK online publications.
See Also:  Non-Print Legal Deposit regulations laid before parliament (February 7, 2013)
See Also: British Library Welcomes Public Consultation on Non-Print Legal Deposit (February 27, 2012)
See Also: UK Web Archiving and Preservation Task Force (via DPC)
See Also: UK Web Archive (Search)

Filed under: Libraries, News, Preservation