The British Library has opened the doors to its fascinating UK Web Archive project. The library has been collecting screenshots of websites since 2004 for the archive, which will “observe the unfolding history of a specturm of UK activities represented online”.

There are special collections already started for specific news events, such as the London bombings in 2005 and the Indian Ocean Tsunami of the same year, as well as for topics and trends, such as blogging and electronic publishing.

More than 6,000 websites have been captured so far, according to this report from V3.co.uk. But the project will run into copyright issues unless the Department for Culture, Media and Sport steps in, as much of the material cannot be archived without permission from the copyright holder.