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The UK's online heritage could be lost forever if the government does not grant a "right to archive", a group of leading libraries has said. The British Library, along with other institutions, has been archiving UK websites since 2004 but has only been able to cover 6,000 of an estimated 8m.
Currently, it must ask permission from website owners before archiving them. The group, which has just made its UK Web Archive available to the public, warned of "a digital black hole".
"We've got the know-how but we need the rules to say we don't need to ask permission," said a spokesman for the British Library. "We're archiving for the nation rather than commercial gain."
The British Library believes the UK Web Archive could prove as useful to historians as ancient pamphlets and other ephemeral material in its archive. The consortium, which also includes the National Library of Wales and the Wellcome Library, is lobbying the government to clarify elements of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act.
The act, which among other things means that every UK print publication is automatically deposited by publishers in the British Library, was extended in 2003 to cover online material. Websites are the successor to that But the British Library says it never clarified what steps had to be taken before electronic material was recorded.
"We're in the ridiculous position where we have to ask permission of each webmaster before we archive a site," the spokesman said. The Department of Culture Media and Sport is currently consulting on the act.
"Limited by the existing legal position, at the current rate it will be feasible to collect just 1% of all free UK websites by 2011," said British Library chief executive, Dame Lynne Brindley. She said the UK Web Archive project was necessary to help "avoid the creation of a 'digital black hole' in the nation's memory".
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