This library has every book ever published.
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it to explain why legal deposit should be complete rather than selective.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2023 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Cites chii · 2023-10 · on “How to Move Your Google Photos”
> 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!
Cites johnfernow · 2023-12 · on “Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet”
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 eve
Cites graemep · 2024-03 · on “British Library cyber incident review [pdf]”
The British library has pretty complex systems because of the vast size of teh collection. Some pretty interesting stuff: [this video]
Cites wky · 2026-06 · on “A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones”
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]