Thomas Jefferson Building Aerial by Carol M. Highsmith. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. The Thomas Jefferson Building is the main building of the Library of Congress.

A few weeks ago, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC wrote to say that would be including Global Voices’ archive of stories as as part of the Library's permanent collection.

The Library—which serves the US Congress but is essentially the national library of the United States—has been preserving web sites they expect will be useful to researchers since 2000. “We consider your website to be an important part of this collection and the historical record,” they wrote, adding:

Our web archives are important because they contribute to the historical record, capturing information that could otherwise be lost. With the growing role of the web as an influential medium, records of historic events could be considered incomplete without materials that were “born digital” and never printed on paper.

We're very excited about this development, as it means that GV will be archived in perpetuity and accessible to the public as part of the Library's collections even long after we're all gone (as bizarre as that is to think about!).

For more information on the Library's web archiving programme, visit http://www.loc.gov/webarchiving/.