It's the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta: the document that King John was forced to sign by English barons in 1215, and which has served as the cornerstone for many of the world's judicial systems ever since. And to commemorate it, the British Library has published its crowdsourced version for the digital world. The …

Contributors to the iconic feminist magazine Spare Rib, which ran from 1972 to 1993, have been warned not to sign away their rights. Last week the British Library contacted over a thousand former contributors giving them just seven days to give their consent to what it described as a "digitisation project". If authors …

British author HM Forsyth was working on a book in the British Library last week when he needed to read Shakespeare's Hamlet, so he did what anyone would do these days: he Googled it, safe in the knowledge that MIT has put the Bard's entire output online. And that's when something nasty happened: The Library's WiFi denied him …

Argos and a page discussing posh camping have been placed on a list of 100 websites the British Library regards as crucial reading for future generations who want to understand life in 2013. To mark the beginning of an ambitious attempt to archive the entire British internet, librarians from across Britain put their heads …

On the same day that thousands of public sector bods will go on strike in a row over pay, pensions and working conditions, new regulations will come into force at midnight tonight allowing the British Library to begin scraping content from UK websites. Under the rules - known as legal deposit - the country's biggest collector …

File formats and the software capable of reading them are living longer than previously thought, according to a British Library and UK Web Archive study. Formats over Time: Exploring UK Web History (PDF, slides as PDF) considers 2.5 billion files author Andrew N Jackson retrieved with the help of the Internet Archive and the …

Although some parts of the public sector are facing savage cuts, Big Culture is still throwing taxpayers' money away on fashionable gimmicks. The British Library, which boasts a £137m budget, is even appointing a full-time wiki-fiddler at the public's expense. The job, on a pro rata salary of £30,768, is grandly titled " …

The British Library and its commercial partner brightsolid opened up a pay-per-view online archive of newspapers today, after a crack team scanned 4 million searchable pages that mainly date from out-of-copyright papers published in the 19th century. It was confirmed in May 2010 that the British Library and brightsolid – which …

MPs heard a spirited debate about digital rights this week – including the digital rights you might or might not have as an amateur creator. Big media companies would like the freedom to use artwork they find on the web without having to worry about lawsuits or negotiating market rates with creators. The web is awash with …

The British Library is handing 250,000 books to Google for scanning into the Google Books project. The Library had previously partnered with Microsoft which digitised books from the 19th century and Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. The Library only owned one of the notebooks - the second was from Bill Gates' own collection. The …

Review Christmas 1977, my parents bought me a copy of Pan Books' The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction The progenitor? I'd been reading 2000AD since April - from issue eight, since you ask - and was soon devouring secondhand paperbacks by John Christopher, John Wyndham, Arthur C Clarke …

The British Library exhibition of the history of science fiction opens today. The exhibition takes the long view of the genre starting with Lucian of Samosata's A True Story, a satirical trip to outer space powered by a giant water jet. The exhibition is divided into Alien Worlds; Future Worlds; Parallel Worlds; Virtual …

Every time Conservatives come to power, they promise to invigorate fusty old state institutions. They vow to set them free of the mediocre, the time-markers and the empire-builders they've acquired over the years, and renew them with competition and fresh thinking. But by the time the Tories leave office, these gravy trains …

Amidst the submissions to the UK gov's copyright review from trade bodies, and the cranks and nutters who inevitably bombard any public consultation on IP with their unwanted opinions, there's a fascinating proposal that should interest anyone creating or using visual images on the interwebs – photographers, graphic artists and …

How curious. The Government's review into IP and growth may have been set up by mistake, or at least on a false premise. On announcing the review last November, Prime Minister David Cameron said something quite curious. Cameron explained that the review was a response to Google's concerns... "The founders of Google have said …

The British Library and its commercial partner brightsolid - a division of DC Thomson - are to digitise 40 million pages of old newspapers. The library holds 52,000 national and international titles covering 300 years. Currently researchers, 30,000 a year, have to go to Colindale in north London to scan through microfilm or …