British Library seeks to fill black hole of digital memory

LONDON— Capturing the unruly, ever-changing Internet is like trying to pin down a raging river. But the British Library is going to try.

For centuries the library has kept a copy of every book, pamphlet, magazine and newspaper published in Britain. Starting Saturday, it will also be bound to record every British website, ebook, online newsletter and blog in a bid to preserve the United Kingdom’s “digital memory.”

As if that’s not a big enough task, the library also has to make this digital archive available to future researchers — come time, tide or technological change.

The library says the work is urgent. Ever since people began switching from paper and ink to computers and mobile phones, material that would fascinate future historians has been disappearing into a digital black hole. The library says firsthand accounts of everything from the 2005 London transit bomb- ings to Britain’s 2010 election campaign have already vanished.

“Stuff out there on the web is ephemeral,” said Lucie Burgess, the library’s head of content strategy. “The average life of a web page is only 75 days, because websites change, the contents get taken down.

“If we don’t capture this material, a critical piece of the jigsaw puzzle of our understanding of the 21st century will be lost.”

The library is publicizing its new project by showcasing just a sliver of its content — 100 websites, selected to give a snapshot of British online life in 2013 and help people grasp the scope of what the new digital archive will hold.

An automated web harvester will scan and record 4.8 million sites, a total of a billion web pages. Most will be captured once a year, but hundreds of thousands of fast-changing sites such as those of newspapers and magazines will be archived as often as once a day. The content will be public by the end of this year.