The British Library has taken on the incredibly daunting task of archiving every website that originates in the United Kingdom to continue their job of keeping record of every British publication.
The Library has already been collecting every printed matter that originates in the country and now has moved on to including websites under that category as well. They actually started this project back in 2004, but had to request the author of each website if they could be included in the archive making the task extremely slow considering there are about 4.8 million websites with the .uk suffix.
Now, the Library no longer asks for permission in order to speed up the work and make the websites publicly accessible. They hope to have accumulated everything by the end of this year. That’s about one billion individual pages that will need to be archived!
The British Library will be using a automated web crawler to find all the websites and then will an annual scan will be made to update the list. However, some sites like newspapers, magazines and blogs will be scanned and updated daily.
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