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Management of digital preservation
It is easy to be daunted by the challenges of digital preservation. While knowledge is by no means a complete answer, understanding what the collections contain and their characteristics has proven to be a good starting point for understanding the problems that have to be addressed.
Digital collections
The digital collections for which the Library has accepted a preservation responsibility can be classified as follows:
- PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive that contains Australian online publications which have been selected for preservation by the National Library or its PANDORA partners
- Australian digital publications originally entering the National Library’s collections on physical carriers such as magnetic discs, tapes or optical discs (e.g. CD-ROMs), that are selected for preservation by the Library
- digital audio items acquired or created as part of the Library’s Oral History and Folklore or Music collections
- preservation master copies of collection materials generated by the Library’s digitisation program
- selected unpublished computer files deposited in the Library’s Manuscripts collection
- original digital images acquired for the Pictures collection
- digital spatial data sets and mapping resources acquired for the Maps collection that have been selected for preservation by the Library
- digital versions of transcripts of the Library’s Oral History recordings
- the Library’s corporate records in digital form, including components of the Library’s website that are selected for long-term retention
- digital materials held on behalf of other partners
- information resources listed on the PADI subject gateway that are selected and approved for ‘Safekeeping’ by the Library
- metadata records that are required for long-term retention.
The information we aim to know about our digital collections
The Library regularly collects the following collection management information about its various digital collections:
- the number of ‘titles’ (and in the case of PANDORA, the number of ‘archived instances’ of titles)
- the number of files
- the number of file types
- the total ‘byte size’ of the collections
- the software required to provide access to items in the collection.
