The British Library has launched the UK Web Archive offering access to thousands of UK websites. You can find it here. From the press release
Currently home to roughly 8 million sites, the UK web domain is a rapidly expanding and constantly changing record of social and cultural issues in 21st century Britain. Despite common misperceptions, material that is freely available on the web is still subject to copyright and cannot be archived without permission – a time consuming, expensive, and often impossible task. Worryingly, recent research estimates the average life expectancy of a website is just 44 – 75 days, and suggests that at least 10% of all UK websites are either lost or replaced by new material every six months!
Since 2004, the British Library has been working closely with a number of organisations including JISC, the National Library of Wales, and the Wellcome Library to record Britain’s online presence for the benefit of future research. Material available through the web archive also covers records from other archival bodies including the National Library of Scotland and The National Archives.
Underpinning the infrastructure for the UK Web Archive, the British Library has recently been working with a number of technology partners including IBM to develop the ability to capture content and make it available. Using IBM’s BigSheets software the Library aims to not just archive online content but also to improve appropriate methods of access. This collaboration with IBM will enable the Web Archiving team to extract, transform and annotate, as well as statistically and algorithmically analyse web pages, vastly speeding up the archival process.
“A new technology prototype, BigSheets will essentially do for big data what spreadsheets did for personal computing,” says Rod Smith, Vice President, Emerging Internet Technologies, IBM. “We are delighted to be working with the British Library to develop the advanced software that will enable users to explore the mass of unstructured web data, and extract useful information for research.”
British Library Chief Executive, Dame Lynne Brindley said:
“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 theprovision of legal deposit through regulationto cover freely available UK websites, providingregular snapshots ofthe free UK web domainforthebenefit of future research.”
