And the Archivist Angels rejoice
Apr. 8th, 2013 03:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
morgandawnI blogged about it.
The OTW journal tangentially touched on it.
Even The Deutsche Welle noticed it (and had to point out that the French were doing it better)
Less than 1% if Britain's cultural heritage was being preserved - less than what was saved by the monks during the Dark Ages.
But this weekend, the British Library announced that it had cleared legal and technical hurdles and are finally about to begin preserving British websites. It will take them 6 months to capture and archive websites with a .uk domain and from there they will do an annual crawl.
The reason for the delay? For decades Britain operated on an "opt in" basis which required them to obtain permission before archiving public websites. This reduced their preservation efforts to a meagerly thin trickle. The Wayback Machine (aka Internet Archive) follows the Oakland Archive protocols and uses an "opt out" process which allows them to capture first and remove upon request. In the decades it took the British Library to fight their way through the layers of legal bureaucracy, the WayBack machine captured 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (that's 10 petabytes folks) of data.
And on that note, WebCite, Wikipedia's main citation and linkrot prevention tool is still raising funds in order to continue operating.They set up a Facebook page here. And even more amusingly, they created their own fundraising trailer. Be kind - they're coders and geeks and not vidders nor are they PR or fundraising savants. But they've been providing this service to the world - for free -- for over 10 years and it is a service we desperately need to continue. You can donate here.
The OTW journal tangentially touched on it.
Even The Deutsche Welle noticed it (and had to point out that the French were doing it better)
Less than 1% if Britain's cultural heritage was being preserved - less than what was saved by the monks during the Dark Ages.
But this weekend, the British Library announced that it had cleared legal and technical hurdles and are finally about to begin preserving British websites. It will take them 6 months to capture and archive websites with a .uk domain and from there they will do an annual crawl.
The reason for the delay? For decades Britain operated on an "opt in" basis which required them to obtain permission before archiving public websites. This reduced their preservation efforts to a meagerly thin trickle. The Wayback Machine (aka Internet Archive) follows the Oakland Archive protocols and uses an "opt out" process which allows them to capture first and remove upon request. In the decades it took the British Library to fight their way through the layers of legal bureaucracy, the WayBack machine captured 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (that's 10 petabytes folks) of data.
And on that note, WebCite, Wikipedia's main citation and linkrot prevention tool is still raising funds in order to continue operating.They set up a Facebook page here. And even more amusingly, they created their own fundraising trailer. Be kind - they're coders and geeks and not vidders nor are they PR or fundraising savants. But they've been providing this service to the world - for free -- for over 10 years and it is a service we desperately need to continue. You can donate here.