Archiving Britain's web: The legal nightmare explored. Websites are gaining increasing recognition as being culturally valuable -- as snapshots of our cultural history. But could a change in the law be the only way to preserve them?
An investigation by Katie Scott - on Wired. http://tinyurl.com/yhcuhe2 A proposal that could give select institutions the power to take snapshots of websites without their owners' permission is being ruminated by our Government. Civil servants at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport are now processing opinions on whether we should be archiving websites for future generations. While it is likely that any changes to the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act won't be tackled by the present government, the public consultation has raised some interesting questions -- should we be treating websites as culturally important artefacts; should we be taking regular "snapshots" of websites and saving them in a searchable and accessible archive; whose responsibility is this; and most importantly, should copyright on websites be ignored so that their content can be saved? The British Library, the National Library of Wales and the Wellcome Library are among the institutions that lobbied the government on the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act. It is this act that stipulates that a copy of every printed publication made in this country is sent to The British Library, and, on request, to five other "deposit libraries", which include the National Library of Scotland; the National Library of Wales and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The institutions argue that the act needs to be adapted to include websites, allowing them to archive websites without contacting the owners. The British Library has, in fact, been archiving websites for six years. Last week, it unveiled the culmination of this work -- an archive of 6,000 websites it deems culturally significant -- called the UK Web Archive. These include the websites of high street shops that fell prey to the recession; and the website for Antony Gormley's Fourth Plinth art installation in Trafalgar Square. The archive has been available to the public since the end of last year. However, as Stephen Bury, head of European and American collections told Wired: "The new website is more useful as you can search by subject." _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
