A presentation by Margaret Phillips, Manager Digital Archiving, National Library of Australia for the Keeping Government Publications Online : Guidelines for Commonwealth Publishers Seminar, July 2002.
Any government agency that publishes information has a responsibility to ensure that it remains accessible to the Australian public for the long term. Even though it will pass its 'use-by' date in the context of current government policy or business, it is nevertheless required to be kept available for legal, cultural and historical reasons.
In addition to those agencies producing publications, the National Library and the National Archives have a significant role in the long-term access to and preservation of government publications.
In this presentation I shall describe the role of the National Library in collecting and preserving online government publications and the ways in which agencies and the Library can cooperate to keep Commonwealth publications online.
Under the National Library Act, 1960 , the Library has a mandate to build a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and Australians. Commonwealth government publications have very high priority in our collecting program.
Traditionally the Library has collected Commonwealth publications in print and continues to do so. Under the Legal Deposit provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 one copy of all Australian publications in print, including Commonwealth publications, must be deposited with the Library. Since the 1980s, we have also collected floppy disc and CD-ROM formats. In 1996 we began to collect online publications as well.
In addition to collecting Commonwealth publications, the Library also has an important role in describing them so that researchers will be able to find them and gain access to them. In library parlance, we catalogue them and make the records available through our own online catalogue, as well as through the National Bibliographic Database (NBD). The NBD is an online national union catalogue that contains descriptions of publications and information about where they are located and therefore assists people to find them. Libraries around Australia, including Commonwealth agency libraries, add records to the NBD for all formats, including online publications. Since the Australian Government Index to Publications (AGIP) ceased last year, the NBD is the only comprehensive source of information on Commonwealth publications, past and present.
Search engines and web portals facilitate the discovery of government information currently on the web. However, in ten or 20 years time, as agencies change functions, merge, are disbanded, are renamed, it is likely that few of today's online publications will still be available on agencies' sites. The catalogue record in the NBD contains a link to the publisher's site as well as to the copy in the Archive and therefore assists members of the public to discover information both now and in the future.
Having collected publications in various formats, the Library also has a responsibility to preserve them indefinitely. The preservation of online publications is a complex and expensive business. As yet there are few clear solutions. However, the Library is actively engaged in research and is in contact with other organizations internationally that are also involved in this work. It makes good sense from the point of view of the taxpayer's dollar for the National Library and the National Archives to take the leadership in the preservation of government information and to share the benefits with all agencies. Rather than individual agencies developing and implementing expensive preservation programs, this can be managed centrally to a large degree.
In 1996 the National Library recognised the need to start collecting Australian online publications as part of its documentary heritage role. It was only the second national library anywhere in the world to take this initiative, which has been recognised internationally for a number of years now as a leader in its field.
The Library's collection of online publications is accessible via the PANDORA Archive< http://pandora.nla.gov.au/index.html>and it currently includes over 2,500 titles, many of which are Commonwealth publications. Many have been gathered multiple times to capture changing or additional content, for instance, in the case of serial publications.
It is important to stress here that we do not just link to the publisher's site but, with the permission of the publisher, actually make a copy of the publication and store it on the Library's server. This is essential for two reasons:
The Library collects both freely available and commercial publications and has an effective and secure system for managing access to commercial publications. To protect publishers' commercial interests, the Library restricts access to a publication for the duration of its commercial viability, a period which is nominated by the publisher. During this period the publication is restricted to use from a single PC in the Library's main reading room with electronic copying and communication functions disabled. There are now about 90 commercial publications in the Archive, a number of which are government publications.
Because of our work over the past six years, the Library is in a strong position to collect and preserve Australian online publications. We have efficient procedures, experienced and skilled staff, and a sophisticated digital archiving system that gathers, stores, documents and manages access to Australian online publications. A preservation plan is in place, together with a research agenda.
However, while significant progress has been made in our ability to collect and preserve online publications, there are still a number of problem areas, especially for Commonwealth publications.
The definition of an online publication is much less clear than a print publication and publishers can be uncertain about what to make available to the Library. A broad definition is suggested in the brochure.
Agencies have an ongoing responsibility for making their publications accessible to the Australian public. If you follow the steps in the brochure that you have been handed this morning, you can meet this responsibility with the assistance of the National Library and the National Archives.
The brochure describes what steps you as creators, publishers, web masters, and policy makers can take now to help the National Library and the National Archives to preserve government information. It provides a list of sources of information that can be consulted to address specific issues.
National Library staff search the web to identify publications for archiving, but this is a time-consuming and fallible process. To ensure that we know about your online publications, please use the notification form at http://pandora.nla.gov.au/registration_form.html. And please give us permission to archive it by turning on the 'yes' button. Even better, contact us and give permission to archive all your freely available publications.
The National Library has received no additional funding from government to deal with online publications and there are, therefore, limitations to what we can do. The Library will archive all types of Commonwealth publications as defined in the brochure that are published online only, that is, where there is no print version. Where there is a print version published, the Library, for resource reasons, will collect and preserve this version in preference to the online version, although where there are substantial differences between the two we will collect both. As mentioned earlier, agencies are obliged to deposit a copy of all print publications with the Library under the legal deposit provisions of the Copyright Act.
In future we hope that increasing efficiencies might enable us to collect and preserve both print and online versions of the same publication. For instance, extension of legal deposit provisions to electronic publications would save the resources required to seek permission for each title to be archived. And we'll continue to seek technical solutions to enable us to handle larger volumes of material.
Publications that are produced according to better practice guidelines will support the widest possible current access as well as making long-term access and preservation more likely. The brochure lists a number of information sources that may help you do this.
An example of better practice that will assist preservation is the use of standard file formats in ways that conform to the standard. The simpler the data format, the easier it will be to preserve access to it. Information in simple HTML should be relatively easy to preserve, whereas features such as plug-ins and Java script could make it more difficult.
Under the Government Online Strategy, agencies have an obligation to produce web-based descriptions of their information and services using the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) metadata standard.
The AGLS metadata standard provides efficient access to descriptions of government resources on the web. Compliance with the standard will ensure a nationally consistent approach to description of government resources. This in turn will help people to locate resources without needing a detailed knowledge of government structures.
I'd like to draw your attention to an additional source of information on metadata not mentioned in the brochure. It's Guidelines for the Creation of Content for Resource Discovery Metadata prepared by the National Library and the State Library of Tasmania. There are copies available on the tables outside the theatre and it is online at www.nla.gov.au/meta/metaguide.html
In the future there may be additional benefits from applying AGLS metadata. For instance, the Library plans to investigate harvesting AGLS metadata as a means of identifying Commonwealth publications. This could enable us to automate some of the identification and notification procedures referred to above and this would benefit both agencies and the Library. The message here is that using AGLS metadata introduces structure into the management of government information, which may realise benefits above and beyond those originally envisaged. It is therefore a very good thing to do.
International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSN) and International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) were designed for print serials and books respectively but many online publications are also eligible for them. They identify them uniquely and enable more efficient management of them by publishers and libraries.
The Services for Publishers page http://www.nla.gov.au/services/serv_pubs.html on the National Library's site provides information about ISSN and ISBN and how to obtain them.
Ask your agency library to catalogue your publications on to the National Bibliographic Database (NBD). But first they must know of their existence. Librarians from government agencies frequently tell us that they do not know what their agency is publishing. Each agency should keep a central record of its publishing and the library is the obvious place for this to happen.
A common problem with web resources is that links to them break. To fulfil the requirement to keep government information available to the public, this must be overcome. A persistent identifier is a unique name that can be assigned to digital object. This persistent identifier remains the same regardless of where the object is located, that is, regardless of change of URL.
To be effective, persistent identifiers do need to be properly managed. That means the new URL must always be linked to the persistent identifier and this is usually achieved by using a resolver database. This will enable people to find a publication even though it has been moved to a new web address, which as we have already noted is not uncommon for Commonwealth publications.
Unfortunately, at this stage, there is no one obvious system for persistent identification that we can recommend to you, though the brochure Managing Web Resources for Persistent Access does make some suggestions. The National Library is currently investigating options for a national persistent naming and resolving service, which would be made available for publishers to use.
The Library assigns a persistent identifier to every title it archives.
It is important to remember that because of the authoritative nature of government information, indexing and abstracting agencies and web portals often index Commonwealth publications, and research papers often refer to them. If URLs change then the citations point to broken links and this is frustrating for everyone concerned.
If you decide not to use persistent identifiers at this stage, at the very least you should organise and manage your site to reduce the need to move material around. The National Library's brochure Managing Web Resources for Persistent Access gives some suggestions on how to do this.
There seems to be a move away from organising web sites using a static directory structure. Web sites increasingly are dynamically created and database driven. Anyone trying to cite a URL generated by such a site has a lot of difficulty. If hand entered, there is the likelihood of error. Cutting and pasting into the browser's address box does not always work because of the '&' separators. Libraries, indexing and abstracting agencies, web portals, authors wanting to cite URLs in research papers are all adversely affected by this. For instance, I wanted to cite a publication from a site organised in this way in this brochure. The URL was so long and unwieldy that the only way to manage it was to request permission to archive it and then to cite the persistent identifier for the archived version.
The staff in the Digital Archiving Section of the National Library would be happy to discuss any of these issues with you. We are committed to finding better ways of doing things and any ideas for improving methods of archiving government publications are welcome. We would welcome the opportunity to meet with you to discuss ways we can work together to ensure the preservation of Commonwealth publications.
Owing to the popularity of this seminar, we have set up a seminar web site, which, in about 2 weeks, will include speakers' presentations and a record of the panel session.
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