Never mind monitoring my e-mails and my phone calls. Is anyone storing my web site?
At the level of principle, I object fundamentally to the notion that GCHQ in the UK or the NSA in the USA might be routinely recording my e-mails or phone calls. At a practical level, however, I don’t care that much – such messages are ephemeral and I always try to communicate in private as if I was communicating in public.
Now, when it comes to my web site, that’s different. It would great to think that someone is recording all that I put on the web. If the public site was lost, it would be good to think that the content survived somewhere. When I die or stop running a web site, it would be good to know that the material is still available to researchers or historians or anyone with an interest.
So, imagine my excitement when I recently attended a Nominet Policy Forum and met and heard the wonderfully named Helen Hockx-Yu who has the wonderful title of Head of Web Archiving at the wonderful British Library.
Helen told the Forum that the British Library now archives digital as well as print publications, It has a statutory responsibility to archive all .uk domains which are text-based and published. Using web crawling, all domains are archived once a year and some web sites are archived more frequently, quarterly, monthly or even weekly.
Currently that means that around 1.4 billion URLs and 4 million sites are archived which represents 31.5 terabytes of information.