British Library to Archive Electronic Resources

An anonymous reader writes "The British Library is a government-owned library that legally has to hold a copy of every book, pamphlet, map, journal, newspaper and piece of sheet music published in the UK. Today, that law changed and now the Library will be able to collect non-paper resources, such as websites, electronic journals, CD-ROMs and microfilms. Obviously, the library won't be archiving everything in these categories (for a start, the Wayback Machine already does a pretty good job of the websites), but will be keeping resources of national, historical or academic interest. There's more specific information in The British Library's press release. BBC News (which will now be archived by the Library) has an article on the changes."

Comments

Storage

[rf0]

Well I have to wonder how all this will be stored and made secure for the next 100 years. Its going to take some large scale hardware, with a fast recall mechanism. Whatever company gets/has the contract must be rubbing their hands with glee

Rus

Re:Storage

[bug-eyed monster]

Yeah it'll be interesting to see how the info will be stored. Looks like they're also collecting CD-ROMs and other "non-print publications." I don't think they absolutely need to store it somewhere that'll last for 100 years. They could store it in redundant media and just replicate them over time as the media's lifespans expire.

As far as fast recall, the articles don't say if the info will be available on the net. If it's just for archival purposes, they don't need to put it anywhere that's quickly accessible. After all it's a government-run library, so nobody will expect to take less than a day or two to retrieve anything.

Censorship?

[samjam]

So when all the news web-sites have to pull a story because it relates to a trial... will it be pulled from the archive?

Will it be put back after the trial?

Or will it be a highly biased archive where anything that ever went to trial is strangely absent apart from the verdict.

I used to manage the ananova search engine and it was a royal pain to have to yank spidered stories out of the result set, yet the way some websites work (different urls for same story) it would be back in again after a while. Judges don't care for such technical excuses.

Re:Censorship?

[squiggleslash]

It's "easiest" just not to archive anything whatsoever - regardless of whether the content's legal or not. However, doing so would be against both the spirit and word of the law.

The law puts an onus on the British Library to archive everything. It also puts an onus on the British Library not to publish material that might prejudice a court proceeding. The only way to obey both laws is to archive everything and provide conditional access.

Re:possible?

[__past__]

The existence of the wayback machine pretty much proves that it can be done, doesn't it? Of course, it is inclomplete, but it doesn't restrict itself to the UK either.

Moving into some scary times . . .

[Idou]

I really believe there is too little discussion about issues like this. What you are hitting on is the matter of accountability. It is an extremely important tool for our society. Unfortunately, it usually takes a serious disaster (like the Great Depression) before people realize that accountability is essential to our civilization and something gets implemented. And the situation is even worse with relatively new technology.

People tend to see technology as a separate "thing" that does not require the kind of scrutiny that other issues get. People only get excited when the technology stops working.

For instance, the majority of users have no problem with using a closed source OS like Windows. There are some really important issues about accountability that get neglected but as long as it works, people don't care. The only time people start to care is when insecure code allows their files to be erased and reality bursts their bubble. But what is the complaint? "MS, you need to get it together!" Unfortunately, the majority of people do not associate "accountability" as the main factor behind insecure code. They blame MS for being lazy (which is absurd, for so many reasons).

It seems that accountability is always an after-thought. If the system appears to be working, noone complains. However, without accountability, it is very easy for the system to be completely upside-down, yet appear to be working fine on the surface (most accounting scams appear flawlessly normal on the service, even when BILLIONS of dollars are being stolen or misrepresented).

This is not purely academic, and us /.er's are not immune. Why do we invest so much time into this site without demanding a certain degree of accountability? Is it not possible for our experience with this site to be pretty normal, yet what actually is going on in the background is quite contrary to our very reason for coming here? Without accountability, how will we ever know?