Web archivist - FT.com I don't think many people are able to imagine what exactly I do - it's a hybrid of tasks including technical, legal, managerial, communication and curatorial activities. The purpose is to make sure that the British Library and my team keep a record, as much as possible, of the web for the benefit of future researchers. If we don't, when a website goes offline it disappears and you can't get it back. The site for Antony Gormley's One and Other project, about the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, would have died if he hadn't asked us to archive it. We've been doing web archiving for 10 years. We have collected, as much as possible, a small snapshot of key websites from within the .uk domain and put them online. So far we've been collecting selectively in four broad areas: websites of research interest or value; events of national importance; reflecting diversity of UK life; and web innovation. We have to ask people's permission to archive their websites but pending legislation should mean we won't have to ask any more. So we'll be collecting much more - we are looking at archiving 4-5m websites, doing at least one crawl [browse and copy] of each, per year. Our vision is for the British Library to be the provider of a way to "go back in time" - when a [UK] website is no longer on the live web our archive will be the place to go.