

British Library to Archive Electronic Resources 76
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."
funny face off (Score:3, Funny)
i got 20 bucks on the brits.
Re:funny face off (Score:1)
This comment Copyright 2003 The Queen of Britain. If you steal this shit, she'll fucking cut you.
Re:funny face off (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:funny face off (Score:2)
Re:funny face off (Score:1)
From the 2001 Annual Report [loc.gov], the Copyright Office had a budget of $40,896,000 in fiscal Year 2001, though I'm not clear on whether this includes funding for the storage of earlier MD items. Total LOC funding for 2001 was $572M, plus $119M in gifts.
With the volume of published material increasing exponentially
There is no Queen of Britain. (Score:2)
RT(F)A... (Score:2)
If a site is using a
The potential for overlap with content covered by the DCMA seems negligible but even if there was such an overlap I fail to see how keeping a copy of a web page (and not the files that it may link to) would
Swedish Royal Library too (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Swedish Royal Library too (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Swedish Royal Library too (Score:2, Funny)
Access To The Books (Score:1)
The way I understand that access to the Swedish Royal Library works -- and most other libraries in Sweden for that matter as well as every library I have been in contact with in Denmark and I don't suppose the situation is very different in Norway or Finland -- is that everyone has access to it. That is, it doesn't matt
what about blogs (Score:1, Funny)
does my personal "watch my litle baby pictures" blog will be archived then?
Re:what about blogs (Score:1)
Storage (Score:5, Insightful)
Rus
Re:Storage (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Storage (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Storage (Score:3, Funny)
Rus
Re:Storage (Score:1)
*rim shot*
Censorship? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Moving into some scary times . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Censorship? (Score:2)
To remove something
or
to remove it and put it back again later
or
to remove it and remember to put it back later and put it back later
or
to remove something and be bothered to remember to put it back later and to be bothered to put it back later and to put it back later
Guess whether or not any stories we yanked from the search set were restored, or if we left the cron job running which kept pulling them.
*cough*
I don't know, but I suspect the cron job may have been stopped when an
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
what about music? (Score:1, Funny)
Voluntary or compulsory? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Voluntary or compulsory? (Score:1)
Re:Voluntary or compulsory? (Score:1)
The library is currently government funded to cover just paper documents.
Re:Voluntary or compulsory? (Score:1)
1. New media, such as CD Roms, etc were not previously covered by the mandatory deposit rights the library has, so they may simply be taking this opportunity to make an announcement that covers both CD Roms and the web since that's simpler for the general public to understand.
2. It may also be that without the law being changed, they would not have received the necessary government funding to create and maintain their web archive.
Re:possible? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:possible? (Score:1)
Historical Interest... (Score:1, Funny)
better hardware + bandwidth (Score:2)
Re:better hardware + bandwidth (Score:2)
I hope they archive... (Score:2, Funny)
That's nice but. (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:That's nice but. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's nice but. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That's nice but. (Score:1)
Are you kidding me? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:2)
It wasn't offsite at the time (Score:2)
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:1)
Why discriminate humans? Are the hands of a chimp any cleaner?
Re:That's nice but. (Score:2)
They were watching me pretty closely, though, so, in a profound fit of
National library access is straight-forward... (Score:1)
I understand national libraries in Scotland and elsewhere are a lot less friendly with access, but lots of people visit Wales specifically for NL access. Also, there are only, what
hmmm (Score:2, Funny)
i wonder if the wayback machine will archive them.
More on the legal implications... (Score:2, Interesting)
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