Tom Scott
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2023–2026
4:59 · 2.4M views · Sep 11, 2023
Tom Scott visits the British Library, a UK legal deposit library that receives a copy of everything published, and discusses storing so much material, including the web archive.
HN commenters cite it to explain why legal deposit should be complete rather than selective.
4 comments from Hacker News
In the UK, if you publish a book, magazine or newspaper, by law you have to send a copy to the British Library for archive. A lot of other countries have similar laws. In the UK, legal deposit has expanded to include the web (so long as the person/group creating the content is in the UK), but since many individuals and small businesses are unaware of legal deposit, the UK Web Archive will archive a lot of the web by themselves. Tom Scott interviewed some people from the British Library, and they explain the importance of archiving: > The importance of legal deposit not being selective, and being everything, is: we can't decide today what's going to be important in 50 years' time. We want everything, because we don't know what will be important. He also added his own thoughts: > I cannot overstate just how useful it is to be able to track down things that never made it online, or to research out of print, forgotten books where there are no other copies available, or to scan through every issue of an obscure local newspaper to track down one reference. This is the raw text of history, as it happened, and someone has to keep it preserved for the future. source: this video
> go through them with the critical eye, and ask yourself if people would be interested in seeing this photo 50 years from now. This is how you lose historical records, because the critical eye of the day is going to be very different in 50 years. have a watch of this video , which is a video of the British Library's archive. They collect published material, no matter how mundane it might seem to be, because only someone from the future looking back can tell whether it was worth preserving. Digital data is trivial to preserve compared to physical materials! Don't delete the digital photos!
There are countries that require published material to be submitted to a national archive[0]. A similar system could be done for software source code and made public on expiry. [0] this video
The British library has pretty complex systems because of the vast size of teh collection. Some pretty interesting stuff: this video