Respectable?

Respectability at last.  After years of no official recognition for the contribution to British smut that The Sleaze has made, we're finally being indexed by the British Library.  Yes, you read that right - the British Library.  It seems that The Sleaze is to finally take its rightful place amongst the UK's literary greats.  Well, we're being indexed by the British Library, although their web archive isn't yet accessible to the public.  Apparently the British Library has had its remit extended to include the indexing and preservation in a digital archive of co.uk websites.  At the moment they are running a pilot scheme to asses the feasibility of the operation and, for whatever reasons, The Sleaze has been indexed by their crawler as part of this.  Clearly, this an important development as it is high time that the digital world was recognised as being just as important as the printed word for its contribution to British popular culture.  That said, because it has taken this long for the British Library to have been given this digital preservation remit, many good sites will already have vanished without trace, lost forever.

Sadly, this has long been a problem with the web - I've lost count of the number of good sites which have simply disappeared.  Unfortunately, digital publications leave no trace behind when they close down, unlike traditional print, which leaves a legacy of already physically published books or back issues of newspapers and magazines.  It's the same with film and TV, which leave behind physical prints, tapes or DVDs.  Likewise, audio leaves behind recordings which can still be accessed and enjoyed.  Hopefully, this new British Library initiative will usher in an era of websites (UK sites, at least) enjoying some kind of afterlife, available for anyone to enjoy long after they cease to be active.  In part, my hopes are driven by sheer selfishness:  the fact is that one day I'll stop publishing new material on The Sleaze and eventually stop paying its hosting and domain registration fees.  I'd like to think that even after that happens, people will be able to access and enjoy an archived version of the site.  Otherwise all the effort and creative energy that went into it would seem wasted.  Perhaps at last web content is moving from being something ephemeral to having some kind of permanence.