In 1610 Thomas Bodley agreed with the Stationers of London that a copy of every book they registered would come to his library at Oxford. It was a private understanding between one man and a trade guild. It is still running, and there are six libraries in it now: Oxford, Cambridge, London, Edinburgh, Aberystwyth, Dublin.

Nobody selects. That is the whole of the design. What arrives is whatever was printed, and it is kept whether it is any good and whether anyone ever asks for it, by people with no stake in which of it turns out to matter.

Since 2013 the arrangement covers British websites as well. That part of the record can be read inside the six buildings and nowhere else. To consult the web as it was, you go to Aberystwyth.

For everything else there is a charity. One has been copying the web since 1996 and works out of a former Christian Science church at 300 Funston Avenue in San Francisco. Another, started in 2007, publishes a crawl of it several times a year that anyone at all can download, and that is the copy nearly everything is now made out of.

Publishers sued the one in the church. It lost, appealed, lost again, and let the last deadline pass.