Together with the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Cambridge University Library and Trinity College's library in Dublin, the British Library is now empowered to receive a copy of every U.K. electronic publication. This is a logical enough extension in the digital age of its ancient right to receive and store all books, newspapers, magazines and other printed matter, but it is still a challenging task. The first full-scale Internet “crawl” was launched from the library’s West Yorkshire computer center shortly after the law took effect. Covering 4.8 million U.K. sites, it took three months to complete, with another two months required to process the 1 billion captured web pages. The expectation is that the library will collect in a single year about the same amount of material as its newspaper and periodicals archive has amassed over the course of three centuries (a costly program to digitize some 40 million of its 750 million printed pages is now underway. Chief Executive Rolv Keating points out that when the initial crawl began, the project represented a reassertion of what it means to be a library in the 21st century. Ten years ago, there was a very real danger of a black hole opening up and swallowing our digital heritage." Keating says. "Millions of web pages, e-publications and other nonprint items were falling through the cracks of a system devised primarily to capture ink and paper.' Professor Niels Brugger, the head of the Center for Internet Studies at Denmark’s AarhusUniversity, supports the British Library’s archiving project.
“More and moreof our societal, cultural and political actives now take place either on the web or are closely related to it” he says. “Since the mid-1990s, you simply couldn’t be a university, a company or a political party without having a website. If want to document our present or study our past on the web, get it into an archive before it disappears.” “Whenever I’m asked why web archiving matters,” he continues, “I think of the Bob Dylan line from The Times They Are Changing — 'The present now will later be past. ‘Material is disappearing before our eyes at an unprecedented rate, and with it goes precious source material for the future historian who will be trying to shed light on the present. Capturing the past for posterity through web archiving matters just as much as preserving other aspects of our cultural heritage, whether it’s kitchen utensils, buildings, warships or collections of newspapers. Studies suggest that 40 percent of what's on it at any given moment is deleted a year later, while another 40 percent has been altered, leaving just 20 percent of the original content.” Almost every major national library in Europe now undertakes web arching. Though the scale and cost of such operations vary widely according to their individual remit. The British Library’s project cost some $5 million to set up, the money coming entirely from its grant from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. 现在，大英图书馆与苏格兰和威尔士国家图书馆、牛津大学的博德利图书馆、剑桥大学图书馆和都柏林三一学院图书馆一起，有权接收英国所有电子出版物的副本。在数字时
