The British Library has a proud history of preserving the cultural records of our society, and as part of this endeavour it holds a copy of every single book and newspaper ever to be published in paper form in the UK (and that’s a lot of shelving).
But our archives have been a little bit slow on the uptake when it comes to the digital revolution, and up until now the British Library has been unable to record any e-publications without seeking individual permissions first.
Thanks to new legislation this is no longer the case, so a major archiving operation has been launched today in an effort to catch up on the world’s reactions to events such as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the 7/7 London bombings.
In order to do this fully, the library aims to record not only electronic versions of newspapers and magazines, but also millions of websites and social media content such as facebook updates and tweets that come from a UK source.
Lucie Burgess, head of strategy at the library, believes that the only way to capture modern society is to look on the web, and fears that the transient nature of our online records means much of our recent history has already been lost.
Personally, I can’t decide how I feel about this. I have pondered the unreliability of digital records before now, so I’m on board with the idea of making an effort to preserve whatever we can (albeit still in a digital form, so this solution probably isn’t completely airtight).
It’s the bit about social media that I find slightly unsettling. I guess at the end of the day you have to accept that the internet isn’t set up to provide a lot of privacy, so if you’ve published something on twitter that you don’t want the world to see then perhaps you should do a little more research into how twitter works.
Besides, it’s not like this will be the first time that history has claimed the intimate writings of a civilian – just look at how much we’ve learned from Samuel Pepys and his ilk.
But at least we had the decency to wait until he was dead to start showing his diary around…
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