Site seen as being of “potential historical importance”

Politicalbetting has been chosen by the British Library as one of very few blogs that will form part of the UK National Web Archive.

A number of institutions are involved and the British Library is handling “sites of research value reflecting national culture and events of historical importance. These could include web pages focusing on key events in national life, museum web pages, e-theses, selected blogs to support research material and web-based literary and creative projects by British subjects.”

This means that our archives will be copied and preserved by the BL so they are available to both current and future generations of researchers.

The archiving will not affect the day-to-day operation of the site and users will continue to be able to access all our records going back to March 2004 from our existing server. But it could be that something could happen to that and the BL archiving will ensure that everything that has been written on here will be available for posterity.

I’ve often been amazed at the information that’s contained in some of our threads which give a real flavour, sometimes minute by minute, of how political happenings are being seen.

The BL archiving will, hopefully, mean that we can slim down the records that we make available here – a factor that is now causing our server to operate less efficiently.

To give an idea of the scale of what’s involved an average of 30,000 words is written on the site each and every day.

All of those who have participated in the discussions can feel a little pride that what’s contained here has been recognised in this way.

Mike Smithson