British Library is going to come up with a national web archive. It would be called UK Web Archive and will be able to store close to 220TB of data every year.

The project was officially started by Culture Minister Margaret Hodge on Wednesday.

The objective of the project is to collect and store data from all the free access websites available in the UK.

The project has been designed and developed by National Archives, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, Jisc and the Wellcome Library. IBM is going to be the technology partner.

The content of the most famous websites, namely the Olympics 2012 and Paralympic Games webistes, Swine Flue 2009 websites and the General Election related sites, would be used.

Also the project would make and maintain websites about MPs who are going to retire before the next general elections.

Talking about the project, British Library Chief Executive Dame Lynne Brindley said, "We hope the current DCMS consultation will enact the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act and extend the provision of legal deposit through regulation to cover freely available UK websites, providing regular snapshots of the free UK web domain for the benefit of future research."