This important research resource has been developed in partnership with the National Library of Wales, JISC and the Wellcome Library, as well as technology partners such as IBM.
"Since 2004 the British Library has led the UK Web Archive in its mission to archive a record of the major cultural and social issues being discussed online. Throughout the project the Library has worked directly with copyright holders to capture and preserve over 6,000 carefully selected websites, helping to avoid the creation of a 'digital black hole' in the nation's memory.
"Limited by the existing legal position, at the current rate it will be feasible to collect just 1% of all free UK websites by 2011. We hope the current DCMS consultation will enact the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act and extend the provision of legal deposit through regulationto cover freely available UK websites, providing regular snapshots of the free UK web domain fort the benefit of future research."
But the British Library has another fear - that old websites will simply disappear into a digital black hole when their owners take them down.
The library says all sorts of material, which may look trivial today, could be of vital interest to future historians.
To that end, it's been working for some years on a web archive of British sites, which is now open to the public.
Note: Search is by Title of Website, Full Text or URL, or browse by Subject, Special Collection or Alphabetical List.
[Snip]
The average life of a web page these days is apparently somewhere between 44 and 77 days. A lot of the web simply disappears into the ether, but this and other archives are doing a valuable job of preserving some traces of our digital lives in a time capsule.
The FreePint Family is a family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success.
'FreePint... provides most of my professional development because it won't come through work and [other resources] just don't cut it.'
FUMSI Forum: Do you have a research question? Post it to the FUMSI Forum, where professionals share Q&A and useful tips on how to Find, Use, Manage and Share Information. It's free.
FreePint Shop:
VIP LiveWire:
