British Library warns UK's web heritage 'could be lost'
Currently the British Library is allowed a copy of every book published, under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act. Publishers automatically provide a copy. However they must ask the webmaster if they want to archive a webpage.
Slowly we are loosing early web pages. Now for a lot of sites that probably isn't an isssue: like teen poetry, some are best forgotten! Yet equally some of this is the modern equivalent of a bundle of letters, a diary, or a journal. We so often say if only we knew what they had to say, more about what was going on at the time.
I wonder if our blog sites will one day be considered the same sort of slice of life as those diaries, and future historians and sociolagists will bemone the massive loss of information from the early days of
computing where websites were disposable, like so many of our other toys.
Even today we are loosing memories as the people who can tell us stories are no longer around to tell us, or worse, unable to do so as Lisa Jardine wrote in her BBC article "When my mother was also painted gold...". Her mother has memory loss and lives in the present, stories lost to time, including those of her unconventional life (including the titular being painted gold) and cannot shed llight on her husband's diaries of his time in Japan visiting the recently bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Interestingly for many of us our blogs show a version of us that does not necessarily link back to a person. Some of you know my real name,but I don't ever use it online. I wonder what future researchers will make of our blogs, should they survive any longer than a paper version would.
Comments