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

Swedish Royal Library too

[k98sven]

The Swedish Royal Library, which has also stores everything published in Sweden (since 1640) has been archiving all swedish web pages. (since 1996, I think)

There was a small flap about this recently, due to new data privacy legislation. They workaround is that the material is not available on the web, but can be accessed at the library.

Which is of course, a bit silly given things like the wayback machine, which are located in foreign countries where EU privacy directives don't matter.

Re:funny face off

[TomV]

A very similar requirement benefits the Library of Congress in the USA, under the name "Mandatory Deposit" (here are the rules).

Voluntary or compulsory?

[Ed Avis]

What the articles don't make clear is why legislation was needed. If all that will happen is for the British Library to crawl .uk sites, they could do that already.

For print publications it is mandatory to send a copy to the BL. Obviously that would never be workable for websites. But does the law now say that the BL has the right to take copies of what you publish whether you like it or not, as already happens for dead-tree publications?

For example the library might spider even sites with a robots.txt that forbids it, and be protected (in the UK at least) from legal harassment for doing so.

What new powers does this Act give the library that it didn't have before?

Re:Voluntary or compulsory?

[sh4de]

Why is this important? Unless you have "sensitive" data on you web page, storing the contents of your index.[html|shtml|php] is no big deal now, is it? If you do have this "sensitive" data on your web page in the first place, don't you wish it to be archived somewhere. The age-old question of privacy appalls me sometimes. Not everything is government control and big brother watching upon us. Lighten up!

Re:Storage

[TomV]

Considering the cost of the existing 340km of basement shelving, mostly mobile, in a tightly controlled microenvironment, with fire and flood protection, I certainly wouldn't expect them to skimp on the storage. But I'd expect the competitive tendering process to keep some sort of a lid on the spend.

More on the legal implications...

[Denyer]

...no, not obvious copyright ones (the web being a publishing medium no different to any other in this respect; content is copyright but is said to have been published publically unless password-protected. I don't think robots.txt would stand up in court if other agents such as browsers have access.)

A while back it was posited that sites should actually be reponsible for providing snapshots of sites, though. Fortunately, I believe this was shot down; the cost implications would be mind-boggling.

I'm glad to see proactive steps being taken, however. Current guidelines for selecting content to archive have produced very usable resources in national libraries such as the one in Aberystwyth where I studied. It isn't as if they keep everything, after all...