Blah Blah Flowers

I note, with what could be mistaken for interest if you squinted at it from a distance in poor light, that the British Library has changed, or extended, it's legal deposit laws to cover electronic material, such as CD-ROMs and the Internet. Now, CD-ROMs I can see not being too much of a problem, though will the British Library be investing in making sure that they can be run by curious researchers in twenty, fifty, a hundred years time? As for the Internet, they've said they're going for 'anything with a .uk' domain name, which sounds a rather arbitrary decision to make. It will also change the nature of the way the British Library works, because if the Government made it law that websites send the BL copies of their site every time they add it'll soon become unworkable. Possibly by limiting this to online journals they seek to minimise their workload, technically everything on the internet is 'published', so what criteria they end up using might be interesting. As will be how this information is indexed, stored and accessed. Time will tell whether working on the Internet like it was just another library collection will be the best way of dealing with things.