Major libraries to hold the nation鈥檚 digital memory
Changes to legal deposit will ensure UK鈥檚 online publications are preserved.
Six major libraries across the UK will be given the right to collect, preserve and provide long-term access to the increasing proportion of the nation鈥檚 cultural and intellectual output that appears in digital form from tomorrow, including blogs, e-books and the entire UK web domain.
皇冠体育app 6 libraries are:
Legal deposit
皇冠体育app regulations, known as legal deposit, will ensure ephemeral materials like websites can be collected, preserved forever and made available to future generations of researchers, providing the fullest possible record of life and society in the UK in the 21st century for people 50, 100, even 200 or more years in the future.
Culture Minister Ed Vaizey said:
It鈥檚 right that these long-standing arrangements have now been brought up to date for the 21st century, covering the UK鈥檚 digital publications for the first time. 皇冠体育app Joint Committee on Legal Deposit has worked very successfully in creating practical policies and processes so that digital content can now be effectively archived and our academic and literary heritage preserved, in whatever form it takes.
Access for users
Access to non-print materials, including archived websites, will be offered via on-site reading room facilities at each of the legal deposit libraries. While the initial offering to researchers will be limited in scope, the libraries will gradually increase their capability for managing large-scale deposit, preservation and access over the coming months and years.
By the end of 2013 the results of the first live archiving crawl of the UK web domain will be available to researchers, along with tens of thousands of e-journal articles, e-books and other materials.
Read more about what will be on offer on the .