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1995 National Preservation Office Annual Conference
Multimedia Preservation: Capturing the Rainbow

27-30 November 1995, Brisbane, Qld, Australia

Conference Report

  • Introduction
  • Conference Rationale
  • Pre-Conference Workshop
  • The Conference
  • Conclusion

Introduction

The National Preservation Office (now part of the National Initiatives and Collaboration (NIAC)) Branch of the National Library of Australia held its second annual conference in Brisbane from 27-30 November 1995. Its title was 'Preservation of Multimedia: Capturing the Rainbow' and it set out to explore the preservation challenges of some new technologies. Australian and international speakers addressed the key issues associated with the preservation of digital objects. The conference concluded with the examination of a 'Draft Statement of Principles on the Preservation of and Long-Term Access to Australian Digital Objects'.

The draft principles also formed the major item on the agenda of a workshop held in Canberra on 6 December 1995. At this meeting, 35 representatives from key institutions and organisations involved with the preservation of multimedia examined the principles in detail and made suggestions for amendments and alterations. These draft principles have undergone further revision following consultation with other groups. The Statement of Principles on the Preservation of and Long-Term Access to Australian Digital Objects is now available.

Conference Rationale

The topic of the conference was chosen in response to demands from a large number of people in Australia who are trying to cope with a range of issues associated with the preservation of the ever growing amount of material which is being created and used in digital form. Many are also interested in the possibilities of using these technologies in preservation strategies. They are attempting to keep up with activities here and overseas and are interested in developing methods appropriate for their collections.

Pre-Conference Dorkshop

A pre-conference workshop, 'Towards the digital collection', held on 27 November, attracted a full quota of 40 participants. It was conducted by Alan Howell, Chair of the then NPO Advisory Body and Preservation Manager, State Library of New South Wales and Bronte Turner, Bridgehead/Kodak. The content of the workshop was based on a similar workshop, attended by Alan at Cornell University in August 1995. The Cornell workshop lasted a week, so it was obviously not possible to include the same amount of material in the NPO one.

The 32 completed workshop evaluation forms indicated that the general level of satisfaction with the program was very high. However, a significant number of respondents requested additional workshops with a greater component of hands-on training.

The Conference

The conference attracted 190 registrations from all states of Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore and Fiji. The Australian and international speakers represented a variety of interest groups. The quality of presentations for both spoken papers and posters was high.

The recent study in the United States of America carried out by the US Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information provided a very useful framework and set of reference points for the conference. Two members of that Task Force, Nancy Elkington from the Research Libraries Group in the USA, and Michael Lesk, Bellcore, USA, were keynote speakers at the conference. Michael Alexander, from the British Library gave details of activities in Britain and Europe. A wide range of Australian speakers addressed many aspects of multimedia preservation.

In the opening session, Jan Lyall stressed the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of isolating 'preservation' from a number of other issues when developing strategies for the preservation of multimedia. She identified the key issues as:

  • What multimedia products are being produced?
  • What changes have been implemented to provide Australians with equitable access to these new forms of cultural heritage?
  • How can we improve access?
  • Are the traditional collecting organisations coping with collecting, controlling, preserving and providing access to these new products and forms of information?
  • Is the legislation, particularly Legal Deposit and Copyright legislation, adequate?
  • Do we have the appropriate standards for producing multimedia products?
  • Do we need further research to facilitate preservation and access?
  • What are the costs of producing, providing access to and preserving multimedia products?
  • What type of education is needed to enable custodians to use the new technologies?
  • Has the relationship between preservation and access been recognised?
  • How widely is digitisation being used as a preservation strategy?
  • Who has a role to play in preserving and providing access to multimedia in this new environment?
  • Who has the responsibility for deciding what will be preserved and how access to it will be provided?
  • What partnerships will be required?
  • What is happening in the rest of the world and are we lagging behind?

At the conclusion of the conference, Richard Jones, Vice President, Research and Development, Computer Power Software Group and member of the then NPO Advisory Body, gave a summary of the conference in which he looked at how well each of the issues had been addressed.

In his summing up, he reemphasised the point made by Michael Alexander that digitisation of existing material must add value to it. He also noted that most of the products discussed during the conference were electronic documents: very few were interactive. The conference demonstrated that although quite a lot of activity is taking place in Australia in the creation of digital material, very little is being done to preserve it.

This lack of attention to preservation demonstrated the need for additional research and he expressed his confidence that answers would be found to the technological problems, pointing out that it is already possible to convert from a representational form such as ASCII or Word to a logical form such as SGML. He made some interesting suggestions concerning the type of solutions which could be developed. For example, a form of benign 'Just-In-Time' strategy could be developed to enable documents to provide their own alerting system when they were about to become obsolete or superseded. In this way, when Word 6.0 was being replaced by Word 7.0, all Word 6.0 documents could send out an alert asking for reevaluation.

Richard went on to say that the collecting institutions did not seem to be coping very well at the moment but he believed this to be a result of the transitional nature of technology at present. He suggested that the new technology will settle down. The importance of identifying priorities was stressed. There was a general acceptance of the view that while the collecting institutions still had the major role to play in preserving digital objects, creators or authors would in the future bear more responsibility than they had in the past.

Standards were seen as critical and the need to identify what is acceptable at the moment was considered to be the key to success. The danger of adopting by-products as standards was also mentioned. The need to change existing legislation to deal with new technologies was seen as inevitable and the steps being adopted at this stage appear adequate but it is impossible to predict whether the end result will be acceptable to all concerned.

The relationship between preservation and access has only been recognised in a very few cases. This is another area where legal deposit legislation may assist the collecting institutions.

While it is apparent that some changes are being implemented in Australian society to provide access to the new forms of cultural heritage, these were not discussed in any detail at the conference.

Digitisation is not yet being widely used as a preservation strategy for existing print or image materials. Its primary use is to improve access. However, a few key projects which consider preservation, such as the project to digitise the 1840-1845 publishing output of Australia, were described. For sound materials, digitisation of existing materials is being employed as a preservation strategy because the alternative techniques are becoming obsolete.

It was obvious that we are living through a transition period which Richard compared to a geological fault line: the near past which is on one side of the line is unrelated to the near future lying on the other side of the line. In Australia, if we are lagging behind the rest of the world, it is not by much. We do need to develop training programs to assist those who have to preserve and provide access to new forms of technology. We must watch our costs and make sensible decisions, and in the new environment, new partnerships will have to be formed. It was considered important to establish common principles which would assist in the development of strategies.

It had been suggested at the beginning of the conference that attempts should be made to identify solvable problems and those that are at present 'too hard' and identify mechanisms to address both kinds of problems.

It was agreed that the development and endorsement by key stakeholders of a set of common principles which would underpin all preservation strategies was an achievable task.

It was also agreed that the work of the National Preservation Office (now part of the National Library's National Initiatives and Collaboration (NIAC) Branch) and the Towards Federation 2001 Preservation of Australian Digital Information (PADI) Working Party in the development of guidelines for the preservation of digital objects should be strongly supported.

It is interesting to quote from a letter from Michael Alexander sent on his return to the UK. 'What impressed me most was the very serious and positive view which librarians, archivists, and conservators in Australia appear to be taking in response to the challenge of digital technology. I hope this same attitude might be more forthcoming among my UK colleagues in the future'.

Conclusion

Much new information was provided by both Australian and international speakers and the conference clearly demonstrated that even in today's electronic world, where we have ready access to information from around the world, there is still no substitute for exchanging information, establishing new contacts and discussing common problems in a conference and workshop environment.

The presentations by Nancy Elkington, Michael Lesk and Michael Alexander enabled us to evaluate Australian activities in an international context. There was a great willingness to collaborate on ways to find acceptable solutions to our common problems.

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