ME and Ophelia

BRITISH LIBRARY ARCHIVES WEBSITES
The new law was given royal assent on Friday


The British Library is now able to store web pages and e-mails in its archive after a legal change.

Under the new law, proposed in a Private Member's Bill, future mediums will also be able to be stored as they are developed.

The archive will comprise selective "harvesting" from the 2.9 million sites that have "co.uk" suffixes.

The library already has six legal deposit archives which hold a copy of everything published in the UK since 1911. The new formats - which also include CD-Roms - will join these archives, and be available for future study.

The number of journals published electronically in the UK is expected to jump from 52,000 in 2002 to 193,000 in 2005.

The deposit libraries already hold more than 51 million printed items.