[LINK] British Library plans to archive whole UK Web

[Tony Barry]

Linkers

The National Library os Australia has the Pandora project 
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/index.html where it selectively and 
individually archives material from the web in Australia. Some linkers 
have had material archived.

So far they have resisted the comprehensive approach of the wayback 
machine and now the UK as reported below. They are currently planning 
to host an international conference on web archiving 
http://www.nla.gov.au/webarchiving/index.html

Tony

From: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39158517,00.htm

British Library plans to archive whole UK Web
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Ingrid Marson
ZDNet UK
June 24, 2004, 15:00 BST

The British Library is starting the first phase of a project that may 
eventually lead to it archiving all UK Web sites
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A trial project to archive 6,000 UK Web sites was announced on Tuesday 
by the UK Web Archiving Consortium. The consortium, led by the British 
Library, includes the Wellcome Trust, the National Archives and the 
Scottish and Welsh national libraries.


Each member of the consortium will choose content relevant to its 
subject. All types of Web content will be included, from government 
documents to blogs.

  Richard Boulderstone, director of e-strategy at the British Library, 
said that all types of material will be collected including "informal 
material" such as discussion forums. "Letters and other informal works 
tell us how society is actually operating," he said.

  The British Library will not censor the material because it does not 
want to restrict what people can find out about in the future.

  "We would like to take a snapshot of every year, as a sample of what 
the Web looked like", said Boulderstone, suggesting that in the future 
people could look back to 2004 and see the swear words that Web users 
were using.

  Only a limited number of Web sites will be archived initially but 
"ultimately, we would like to archive the whole UK Web," said 
Boulderstone.

  One of the problems faced by the consortium is that, due to UK 
copyright law, permission is needed before a site can be archived. The 
British Library is working with the government to extend the law to 
allow them blanket access to all Web sites because "there are 4 million 
sites that we would like to capture -- we cannot ask everyone for 
permission," said Boulderstone.

  The UK Web Archiving Consortium is not the first to archive the Web. 
The Wayback Machine, run by US-based Internet Archive, is a service 
that allows people to visit archived versions of Web sites.

  According to Boulderstone, the British Library's approach differs from 
that of the Internet Archive because his organisation seeks permission 
from Web sites. In the future, the British Library hopes to improve on 
Wayback by archiving more frequently and with more depth, and through 
providing metadata so that information can be found more easily.

phone : 02 6241 7659 | mailto:me at Tony-Barry.emu.id.au
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