Building an Internet Archive System for the British Broadcasting Corporation

Since its beginnings as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Networking Club in April 1994, the BBC's Web site has grown to over two million pages. While bbc.co.uk inarguably offers a valuable source of information, entertainment, and education for its users and provides an online arena for peer-to-peer communication, it also brings into focus the challenge of digital preservation. Apart from the sheer volume of material the site represents, the nature of that material is forever changing both to reflect editorial strategy and to benefit from new technologies and improved production techniques. To support its own internal business requirements and to satisfy external legislative requirements, the BBC's Information and Archives Department is building a Legal and Historical Internet Archive System to capture a selection of content as it is published to the "live" site. This article looks at how the design and development of that system supports the preservation of heterogeneous digital material in the wider context of archiving the BBC's new media output.