British Library To Archive One Billion UK Websites

An anonymous reader writes "The British Library is to begin archiving the entire UK web, including one billion pages from 4.8 million websites, blogs, forums and social media sites. The process will take five months, with the aim of presenting a more complete picture of news events for future generations to read and learn from."

Presumably

[AliasMarlowe]

Perhaps they mean one billion web pages rather than web sites. It seems unlikely that the UK could host a billion web sites (even the American billion of 10^9 rather than the British billion of 10^12).

Re:archive.org?

[kaiidth]

Without wishing to offend it, the BL is a monolithic organisation that doesn't always play well with others. Part of that is because funding doesn't always work that way. You can get money for claiming that you are going to do the very first über-awesome UK archive, but your chances of receiving the funding becomes rather lower if in the very first breath you point out that somebody else has been doing pretty much this for a decade. Another part of it is: most politicians would likely want the national heritage, such as it is (jubilee celebration tweets - please...) to be held by that nation's own national library.

I would imagine the BL have referenced archive.org work extensively, but differentiate this project with what tits in suits like to call "a compelling USP." To put it in plain English, they'll have a neat explanation that suggests that they are totally aware of previous work in the domain whilst making sure that this project looks a) different, b) excitingly new and c) contextually, better.

Re:Presumably

[Alain Williams]

Because of the ambiguity I usually say either ''a thousand million'' or use the SI prefix Giga. So: it will be an archive of a Giga web page. Hmmm: doesn't quite trip off the tongue, unfortunately.

Similarly with dates. What does 10/5/13 mean ? 10 May 2013 or 5 October 2013 ? I favour the first (to know why see how I spelled 'favour'), but recognising that it can be misunderstood (by those who spell differently), I would usually write dates as 10 May 2013 - no ambiguity.

Re:Presumably

[Tastecicles]

I use YYYY/MM/DD. By extension, HH:MM:SS. Logical.