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Transcript of talk presented by Michael Lesk, Executive Director, Computer Science Research, Bellcore, at the 2nd National Preservation Office Conference: Multimedia Preservation - Capturing the Rainbow, in Brisbane, 28-30 November 1995.

First of all I would like to thank everybody for making me feel so welcome. It has been very nice being here. I am very impressed with this conference and with the number and quality of the digitisation projects which have been described. It is also very impressive to see the breadth of what is going on, in terms of the media and the subject areas: there is video, sound, architecture, Aboriginal studies and so on.

I guess I do have some questions about the users. I am very worried that too many early library digitisation projects will be in areas where there aren't enough users to build public support. In the United States, for example, the CLASS project is a very nice piece of work, is quoted everywhere and is certainly a big success, but it digitised 500 19th Century maths books which are of relatively low interest to most mathematicians.

The HELIOS project at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) relates to the papers of Senator John Heinz. Perhaps Senator Heinz's political eminence was less important than the availability of funding to convert his papers. This is a project which is probably not going to do a good job of building public support. I think that it is important that the first few digitisation projects be viewed as a public success so that there will be institutional support for going on with preservation, rather than viewing it as, "This is something librarians do for their own purposes".

I wondered whether there would be interest in more projects devoted to identifying the sort of researchers using this material. Bibliotheque Nationale de France actually commissioned several companies to build prototypes of a scholar's reading station. The ambitious plans for support facilities at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France may be in jeopardy as a result of political shifts. However, the basic idea of thinking about what the work environment is and building something appropriate for scholars, is worth looking at.

Moving on to things about Australia: I was very glad to hear the discussion about the distributed national collection which indicated that people are thinking about cooperation and looking at developing remotely accessible material and collaborative software. There have been some interesting projects in the United States with the University of Michigan on the use of low grade video and audio conferencing, and shared screen, editors et cetera, to try to facilitate the collaborative work of groups of people working great distances apart. I would think that this would be of some interest to people in Australia.

One example of remote cooperation, which we were discussing in the break, is the question of maintaining an international inventory of scanning projects. There is, as everybody knows, an international cooperative listing of microfilm projects, and there is a centre for electronic text in the humanities that tries to keep track of everybody in the world who is keying in a significant humanities resource. There is not at the moment an international cooperative list of scanning projects, and that is unfortunate because they are much more varied and much less well controlled than the keystroking of literary works. There is a report that the British Library has commissioned from a consultant named Marc Fresko; the updated report has been volunteered by the British Library with generosity as the basis for an on-line file. There is work in the United States to start a project for maintenance of a scanning inventory and keeping it up to date; we have been talking to Cliff Law about having an Australian contact who could do that here.

There are many people building environmental databases-the University of California, Berkeley, is the best known one. I would think that this type of project would be attractive to Australian libraries; it would clearly be a unique resource. One wouldn't have to worry about duplicating work done in other parts of the world.

The other thing which I didn't hear about and thought might be interesting is the use of new technologies in education. There is obviously a need for distance learning in Australia. It is a very popular subject in the US because the educational system is under great financial pressure and people are looking to new technologies to assist them. The same is true with the UK. I think there is probably more experience with distance learning in Australia than in the UK. There is an obvious market for English-as-a-second-language instruction. Oxford University Press makes a lot of money selling English-as-a-second-language teaching materials in Asia; Australia is a lot closer to Asia than they are.

What I would like to conclude by saying is that I have enjoyed the conference. I have seen a lot of very interesting projects. There were a few things that I haven't seen and I wonder whether it would be nice to have them. Thank you.


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Last updated 27 February 1998