Material on 1bn webpages from nearly 5m .uk websites, plus public
tweets and Facebook entries, are to preserved for the historical record
at six libraries in the UK and Ireland.
The
archive project, aimed at preserving a digital record of events and
cultural and intellectual works to match traditional print archives,
begins on Saturday.
Its organisers say copies of every public
tweet and Facebook entry in the UK could eventually be included. The
moves will also cover ebooks and iPad editions of newspapers and other
digital forms.
The British Library will begin the enormous
operation a day after new regulations laid down by parliament come into
force but already it is warning that key accounts of some events over
the past 10 years have already been lost.
"If you want a picture
of what life is like today in the UK you have to look at the web," said
Lucie Burgess, head of strategy at the library. "We have already lost a
lot of material, particularly around events such as the 7/7 London
bombings or the 2008 financial crisis."
Social media reactions to
the Queen's diamond jubilee celebrations were among other information
that had fallen "into the digital black hole of the 21st century because
we haven't been able to capture it," she said. "Most of that material
has already been lost or taken down."
Burgess added: "We will have
to distinguish between content published in the UK and elsewhere but in
principle we will be able to archive the publicly available tweets of
any individual, company or organisation."
Until now the British
Library could only preserve a relatively small number of websites. The
2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act paved the way for such information to
be stored but copyright laws had forced it to seek permission each time
it wanted to collect web content.
The Bodleian Library, in Oxford,
Cambridge University library, the National Library of Scotland, the
National Library of Wales and Trinity College library in Dublin, like
the British Library, which is acting on behalf of all, have the right to
receive a copy of every UK electronic publication.
The trawl will
include embedded audio and video material but the regulations do not
cover other mediums such as YouTube or Spotify. The project will later
seek to identify UK sites in the .org and .com domains.
Burgess
said that it had taken over 300 years to collect 750m pages from printed
newspapers, yet the aim now was to collect 1bn webpages in a year and
then conduct regular sweeps in future. "It is about taking a snapshot.
It is not for us to say what is of interest. Researchers will be the
judges of that."
Roly Keating, chief executive of the British
Library, said that there had been " a very real danger" of millions of
web pages, e-publications and other non-print items "falling through the
cracks of a system that was devised primarily to capture ink and
paper".
While the 2003 act established the principle that legal
deposit "needed to evolve to reflect the massive shift to digital forms
of publishing", the regulations would make "digital legal deposit a
reality, and ensure that the legal deposit libraries themselves are able
to evolve – collecting, preserving and providing long-term access to
the profusion of cultural and intellectual content appearing online or
in other digital formats."
Access to the material will be offered in reading rooms at each of the six libraries.
Guardian.co.uk
BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22028738
Sharon x
http://www.beckvalleybooks.co.uk
http://www.beckvalleybooks.blogspot.com
