When that time comes

Website owners often worry about what will happen when they're no longer able to maintain their site for whatever reason. Even if the finances hang in there, it's a fact of life that death will intervene at some point in the future. Books endure, of course, and people constantly ask me why I haven't written a book. I like the web and the freedom it gives to write, add, change and take away. I've used it to give access to transcriptions of many documents that wouldn't be available to many people otherwise, and that gives me pleasure - too many things are hidden away, invisible to the general public unless they have the time and money to access them. The British Library have addressed this problem, and set up the UK Web Archive, whereby they save snapshots of websites of interest every six months or so, and preserve them for the future, safe from the time when a live site will exist no more. So it comes as some comfort to know that Scarletfinders will be around long after I depart. Sometime in the far distant future send me a postcard to let me know if you like it.

The British Library UK Web Archive