Comment by londons_explore
1 day ago
Crawling and storing a complete copy of the internet is rather expensive. But a thing worth doing if there is benefit now or in the future to the people of the UK (who are paying the bill).
Yet by restricting to physical access in one room, most likely very few people benefit and I wonder if it is good value for money for the taxpayer.
> UK websites are collected and preserved under legal deposit legislation, which does not allow the Legal Deposit Libraries to make most archived websites freely available online.
Having the thing at all is valuable. The legislation provides a very limited exemption to IP law to allow archiving. Future legislators can work out how to loosen restrictions if its valuable to do so.
Sorry, my point being performing the archiving is the thing that must happen now or it is 'lost' forever.
Not providing wider access can be changed at any point in the future, so it is only 'lost' now.