Compulsory British Library Deposit

  • Hello Boys and Girls,
    Just thought I’d start a wee discussion…
    As some of you guys in gals may know in the UK all publications have to be deposited in the British Library and as of Oct31 (although still under interm processing arangments and voluntary at the mo.) this was extended to online and purely electronic publications.
    Within the terms of the Copyright Act 1911, ‘publisher’ is to be understood as anyone who issues or distributes publications to the public. Items published in the United Kingdom and in Ireland are liable for deposit, as are items originally published elsewhere but distributed in the United Kingdom and in Ireland. The requirement for deposit remains, irrespective of the place of publication or printing, the nature and size of the imprint, or the extent of its distribution.
    Now by that I assume that British Blogs would be considered “published” and therefore should be deposited with the British Library…does anyone else agree?
    If so is there any way to get wordpress to automatically email any new posts to the British Library for archiving?

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Thread Starter arthuc01

    (@arthuc01)

    Just thinking about the line above that says
    “as are items originally published elsewhere but distributed in the United Kingdom and in Ireland”
    Surely that would be the British Library would have to archive every web page on the planet?? because their all “distributed” in the UK?

    You could just put in a mail() call after the post stuff in wp-admin/post.php.

    /me chuckles, imagining how stupid the British Library will feel if that’s really required, and every blogger starts submitting their blogs by email … LOL!

    Thread Starter arthuc01

    (@arthuc01)

    cheers for the tip allusion – I’ve emailed the British Library to see if they are mad enough to require this???
    I’m going to have to do it for a couple of sites I run (a couple of ezines my dad runs) which is what initially got me thinking about this.
    Jaykul your right – allegedly they’ve had 100,000 submissions so far anyway but if every blogger in the uk let alone in the world were to submit to the BL then they could conseivable be looking at that number of posts a day/week easy

    @arthuc01,
    “Surely that would be the British Library would have to archive every web page on the planet?? because their all “distributed” in the UK?”
    I would argue that web pages are not distributed, rather they are imported. I don’t send you my web content, you click on a URI to *request* my pages. In this way, I don’t think that the BL needs to worry about every web page on the planet.
    Also, given the enormous amount of *stuff* that the BL does get, I can see their point in doing this. It’s part of the mandate of keeping a record of all-things-UK for history. In the “good old days” this was more manageable simply because of the fact that most people had no access or ability to publish something. Not so anymore. Apart from the fact that this is a HUGE undertaking, I believe that it has value–imagine historians 200 years from now trying to study the early 21st Century. They could have a good look at the same significant events from thousands of different perspectives. That’s a big difference from looking at history through newspapers etc., which have their own political slants on everything. Nothing like getting a perspective from a sampling of a thousand people than just a small number of “traditional” information publishing sources.
    How they plan on doing this is anybody’s guess. I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of storage space they will need. Perhaps they have some PhDs working on some new data compression algorithms? ??
    Craig.

    Does a meta document *exist* in any permanent sense at all? It will keep the lawyers going for years.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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