Slashdot Mirror
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."
so.... dmca vs british govt?
i got 20 bucks on the brits.
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.
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
Cheap UK and US VPS
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.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
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?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
goatse.cx so I can look back on my mispent childhood in 40 years time.
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.
/.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?
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
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
There's nothing in the BL that you can't get within a fortnight by Inter Library Loan from the crappy little library of your choice.
The British Library isn't a public lending library, it's an academic library. It houses one of the most extensive literary collections in the world and it would seem patently obvious to me why it is that you can't just walk in, fill in a form and just take out whatever you like.
Some of its treasures are so delicate that they can't be touched by human hands - is that the kind of item you think should be easily accessed on a whim?
Is getting hold of relevant material at your own university's libraries really that difficult? Or is obtaining a letter of approval from your faculty impossible? I have to doubt that the answer to both these questions is a "yes".
On a parting note, perhaps you should try comparing the British Library to its one true American counterpart, the Library of Congress. The LoC is a fantastic archive, but despite being publicly funded and supposedly open to the public, you can't access it unless you're actually part of the political machine, as Michael Moore once illustrated.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
i wonder if they'll archive the wayback machine.
i wonder if the wayback machine will archive them.
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...
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Often it's faster than that and if necessary the copy can come from the BL - I've received a book before now that was held in the BL before being delivered to my local library for my attention.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.