This paper was presented by Jan Fullerton, Deputy Director General of the National Library of Australia, to the workshop "Legal Deposit of Electronic Materials", sponsored by the IFLA Section on National Libraries and held in Amsterdam on 20th August 1998.
This paper seeks to identify areas of common interest where national libraries can work together to progress the issues surrounding the management of electronic publications. These are discussed in this paper under the following headings:
Fundamental to the idea of national libraries is the notion that they should take responsibility for collecting, recording, providing access to, and preserving their own national imprint. The extension of publishing beyond the realm of print into a variety of media forms including online electronic publications adds complexity to, but does not change the fundamental role and responsibilities of national libraries.
While national libraries may have different roles and responsibilities, and in some cases a different emphasis or focus on their electronic activities, there is much common ground. National libraries are considering similar issues, and designing or building similar systems for the handling of electronic publications. The National Library of Australia believes that there is value in national libraries which are developing digital collections sharing information, discussing issues and researching specific questions through such means as discussion lists and working groups.
At present, handling digital resources is relatively new for most libraries and raises a number of problematic issues. A brief description of the work in this area currently being undertaken by the National Library of Australia is provided in Appendix 1. One option for sharing information would be to publish this and similar summary reports from other national libraries on the PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) site managed by the National Library of Australia (http://www.nla.gov.au/padi).
Recommendation 1: That national libraries interested in designing and building systems for the handling of electronic publications provide a summary report of their work in this area for publication on the National Library of Australia's PADI site.
National libraries have a well-defined role in collection building and this role extends to collecting and preserving the electronic publishing output of their nation. With physical-format electronic publications, the collection issues are not dissimilar to those pertaining to printed materials. In the online electronic environment the concept of collecting differs from that applied to publications which exist in physical form. Collecting becomes the discovery and registration of an electronic resource and the implementation of processes to ensure that a copy is preserved for future access.
For online electronic publications the way in which this is done may vary greatly. It will depend on the type of material considered within scope for collecting by a given country, the format and general accessibility of the publication and the extent to which publishers are involved in the discovery and registration process. Online capture offers one means of obtaining preservation copies of electronic publications. In some countries, this may extend to capture of an entire domain. However, deposit by publishers will also play an important role. The traditional pattern of a national library being the repository for all national publications may also change, with the emergence of more distributed models.
To achieve their collecting objectives in the digital environment it is advantageous for national libraries have clear statements or policies on the collecting of electronic publications, and to publicise and promote them. For some national libraries legal deposit is an important element in collection building, and an essential element in ensuring the survival of cultural material. In a number of countries legal deposit currently extends only to printed and not to electronic materials. It is important that the principle of legal deposit be recognised as applying equally to digital materials both to ensure their long-term preservation and to serve the public interest in allowing fair access to and use of this material.
The ease with which electronic publications may be reproduced and distributed has tended towards a climate in which publishers are less inclined to concede any kind of fair use to the public and in which there is suspicion of the principle of legal deposit. There is a need for libraries, particularly deposit libraries, to strongly reaffirm the value of, and necessity for, the legal deposit of materials in the digital environment.
It would be useful for those national libraries that have legal deposit status to share information on the extension of legal deposit to electronic publications. In the print world publications are deposited or otherwise acquired. Legal requirements may involve the issuing of receipts. In the online environment a crucial question is what is the equivalent of receival and receipt? This is an area where national libraries might profitably exchange information. One mechanism for achieving this might be the promotion of policies and practice via the PADI site.
Recommendation 2: That national libraries with legal deposit obligations exchange information on the implementation of legal deposit for electronic publications for publication via the PADI site.
Recommendation 3: That national libraries with legal deposit obligations analyse and document the range of models which would need to be supported for electronic legal deposit, and that the National Library of Australia coordinate discussion on this issue through a discussion list.
National libraries are generally responsible for the cataloguing of the printed publications of their country and the production of the national bibliography. Because electronic publications form part of each countrys national imprint, they should be included in the national bibliography (in the widest sense), described in the same way as printed publications and integrated with the print collections.
Describing digital objects has so far presented few problems in terms of traditional cataloguing. Cataloguing rules and MARC formats have demonstrated an evolving responsiveness to the descriptive requirements of the new carriers. A number of standards such as the International Standard Bibliographic Description for Electronic Resources ISBD (ER), AACR2, and the ALA Guidelines for Bibliographic Description of Interactive Multimedia are widely used.
National libraries may also have a role to play in encouraging creators, publishers and distributors of networked electronic publications to include standard descriptive elements in their publications. The Dublin Core metadata set is becoming an accepted approach for registering and describing electronic material requiring a lower level of bibliographic control. As part of this process, there is a need for national libraries to consider appropriate models for providing integrated access to print and electronic publications and for providing improved access to the content of publications. The role of traditional national bibliographic services and indexing and abstracting services needs to be redefined in the context of new electronic services such as web indexes, subject gateways and metadata repositories.
Even more urgent and pressing for libraries and their users is the provision of a reliable system of permanent naming for on-line electronic publications. This is needed to overcome access problems associated with broken links. Currently the National Library of Australia is using a PURL Resolver Service to assign permanent names to its own archived copies, but this is seen only as an interim solution. There is a need for national libraries to agree on suitable long-term permanent naming systems. The National Library of Australia would support the establishment of a working group of representatives from the national libraries to examine the issues and recommend on appropriate and compatible naming systems.
The National Library of Australia favours Universal Resource Numbers (URNs) in line with the Finnish model, and based on the work done by Juha Hakala in Finland. The Library believes that the Finnish model has many attractive advantages as a solution, and recommends that other national libraries consider supporting it.
Recommendation 4: That national libraries endorse the principle that electronic publications are part of the national bibliography and consequently part of their national responsibility.
Recommendation 5: that, as part of the task to analyse and document the range of models which would need to be supported for electronic legal deposit, national libraries consider models for providing integrated access to print and electronic publications and for improving access to the content of publications.
Recommendation 6: That national libraries establish a working
group to recommend on suitable permanent naming solutions.
[This
recommendation was subsequently agreed to at a meeting of the Conference of
Directors of National Libraries in Amsterdam in August 1998. A working party
led by Winston Tabb from the Library of Congress has been established].
National libraries may be called upon to advise, lead, coordinate or establish national systems or national infrastructures for managing national collections of electronic publications. In Australia, the state libraries have indicated that the National Library should take the initiative in developing a framework for ensuring that the widest possible number of digital publications are described, made available and preserved in a cooperative manner.
The national framework or infrastructure in which the establishment of a national collection of electronic publications takes place is important. It is generally recognised that the task of building and maintaining such a national collection is great and may be beyond the capacity of a single institution to sustain. Cooperative national models in which stakeholders other than national libraries play a role have been suggested as an answer. How this is best organised, the management of such a decentralised process, the costs and the most effective ways of streamlining workflows in such an environment remain to be explored.
For national libraries developing a national collection of electronic publications and seeking to manage an archive, the authentication of archived documents will be a major issue. A second matter of interest will be the form that the digital object management system takes.
Providing an accurate record of a nations documentary heritage will involve issues of version control and authentication. This is particularly important for digital publishing where the archived work must remain unchanged and true to the original. Because authentication and the techniques relating to authentication such as encryption, time stamping, watermarking and digital signatures are also of vital concern to business interests, it may be that solutions for library archives will emerge from the commercial sector.
The technical framework for any management system handling a collection of national electronic publications is crucial to national libraries seeking to archive electronic publications for long-term access and preservation. Management systems will need at least some of the following requirements:
Archives of electronic publications will have a need for long-term user access to the archive. The question of access raises issues of copyright and intellectual property.
The National Library of Australia expects that there would be significant advantages in sharing information and cooperatively seeking solutions to the various problems that confront libraries in each of these areas.
Recommendation 7: That those national libraries concerned with developing technical infrastructures or specifications share, compare or comment on each others documents as appropriate.
Recommendation 8: That those national libraries interested in the issue nominate representatives to be on a discussion group to explore issues of authentication of content, and that a group leader for this task be appointed.
The steps involved in identifying, capturing, controlling and managing digital publications in an archive all play a critical role in making preservation possible, but of themselves they are insufficient to ensure long term accessibility. There will be a range of threats to digital archives, needing to be addressed routinely and at recurring intervals. National libraries need to develop and commit to realistic pathways that address the threats in cost-effective ways.
Many preservation measures should be included in standard IT practice such as the use and safe storage of backups and development of counter-disaster plans. However the certainty of future changes in technology will demand other responses that still need to be developed and tested.
It is not possible to guarantee that the preservation pathways currently being developed will deliver long term accessibility. However, national libraries need to keep exploring the potential for migration, emulation, and other approaches, and what would be needed to support them.
Recommendation 9: That a working group be set up to discuss what would be required to support these approaches and to test their potential, taking account of work already known to be happening in these areas.
The activities of collecting, recording, providing access to, and preserving electronic publications each have data requirements that will need to be supported by any robust technical solution. Apart from metadata to assist resource registration, description and discovery, information will need to be recorded to support:
While the preliminary findings of the Research Libraries Group's Working Group on the Preservation Issues of Metadata work have now been published in the form of 16 preservation data elements, there is still much to do to align data requirements and specifications. This work will be a dependency on ensuring interoperability between systems and modules from different suppliers and the ability to transfer responsibilities for archival custody from one agency to another.
Recommendation 10: That national libraries concerned with developing technical infrastructures or specifications work together to identify and/ or develop data standards relevant to preservation of and access to electronic publications.
As well as playing a role through established national and international standards bodies on issues such as metadata, permanent naming conventions and preservation, it is important for libraries to develop relationships with creators and publishers of electronic resources. Many national libraries assume leadership roles within their library communities in the area of standards development and the promotion of intelligent publishing conventions, as for example in the Netherlands where Dutch libraries have been working closely with major publishers. Further development of national library-publisher relationships would be beneficial in addressing issues connected with developing national collections of electronic publications.
National libraries will also need to work with other national libraries and international agencies taking responsibility for the archival custody of electronic publications. There could be a requirement for this at two levels. One national library could depend on another to preserve material published in the second country that dealt with the first. Where a publication of one country contained a link to a publication in another country, protocols could be set in place to make sure the link was transferred to the archived copy when the link to the publisher's copy was no longer current.
While national libraries are natural partners in resolution of the issues described in this paper, there are also other agencies closely involved in infrastructure development in relation to the preservation of electronic publications. The CPA/RLG Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information remains a seminal document in raising issues related to digital preservation. It will be important for national libraries to continue to share information with and learn from the experience of agencies such as the Research Libraries Group and the Digital Library Federation in the United States and the Arts and Humanities Data Service and the CEDARS Project in the U.K.
There is a need for the work being done by national libraries in relation to the preservation of electronic publications to be brought to the attention of the general Internet community. Issues being addressed by national libraries in this area need to be seen as part of the scope of work of organisations such as W3C, not as an area of specialisation only of concern to libraries.
Recommendation 11: That national libraries provide information about relationships they have with publishers as part of their general report for the PADI site.
Recommendation 12: That national libraries work on protocols that will provide access between the national digital archives.
Recommendation 13: That other key agencies involved in infrastructure development in relation to the preservation of electronic documents be invited to participate in the national library discussion groups.
Recommendation 14: That national libraries seek to raise awareness in the general Internet community of the preservation and other issues which affect libraries in developing national collections of electronic publications.
The National Library of Australia (NLA) has a statutory obligation to preserve the nations printed material, and regards the collecting, organising, preserving and making accessible of electronic publications, both online and in physical formats, as a logical extension of this mandate.
To date the Librarys main activity has centred on the PANDORA Project, which involves the capture and archiving of selected Australian online digital publications, and making them accessible to users. Through a hands-on approach the Library has sought to encounter and work through various difficulties associated with capturing and managing online digital publications.
Collection building
NLA collects on the basis of a formal Collection Development Policy, currently being reviewed to take account of the past two years experience with selection guidelines for online and physical format digital publications. The Library is attempting to create a representative, rather than exhaustive, collection of Australian digital publications, although in some areas such as material judged to be of long term research value the intention is to collect comprehensively.
Chosen material is collected and archived by arrangement with publishers of both online and physical formats. Online publications have been captured using modified Harvest indexing software, with mixed success. Recently the Library has been negotiating arrangements for some publishers to push material to the archive.
Physical format material, (magnetic floppy disks and CD-ROMs) has mostly come to the Library under voluntary deposit deeds controlling use and access, or as part of print publications received under legal deposit legislation or purchase.
Legal deposit requirements do not apply to electronic publications at a federal level, although some state libraries have access to legal deposit through state legislation. The federal copyright law, which includes legal deposit provisions, is currently under review.
Description and control
NLA is attempting to integrate the cataloguing of print and electronic publications in the national bibliography and in the Librarys own catalogue. The Library has responded to the need for permanent naming of online files by setting up a PURL resolver service, but as noted in the text, the Library is looking for a more widely accepted and workable solution such as URNs.
With regard to metadata for resource discovery and resource management, NLA seeks to apply Dublic Core metadata to publications it is archiving if not already attached by publishers.
Managing a collection of digital publications
The proposed national infrastructure discussed in the text is likely to influence the way the National Library of Australia manages digital publications as part of a national collection.
The Library is currently looking at authentication and version control but has no mechanisms in place other than careful and transparent documentation of versions captured.
The technical infrastructure currently being used by the Library for the PANDORA archive consists of:
This technical infrastructure is under review as the Library tries to improve the effectiveness of certain elements, and develops a Digital Services Project to manage a wider range of digital objects from the Librarys collections.
The technical infrastructure for physical format digital publications is currently more closely aligned with the handling of print collections, and includes the use of the NLA catalogue, a separate interim database of preservation information, and a program of copying magnetic floppy disks to CD-R for storage and access. Access is restricted to onsite users through the Librarys reading rooms on stand-alone PCs, although the Library would prefer to negotiate controlled single user access from networked drives.
As the Digital Service Project develops it is envisaged that the management of both online and physical format publications will be integrated.
Copyright owners statements are clearly presented with any archived publication, along with a general copyright warning. The Library does not currently apply any other mechanisms to control access or manage intellectual property rights.
Preservation
NLA recognises the main long term preservation threats as media instability, technological obsolescence, and any shortfall in the resources required to deal with them.
Media instability is being addressed by normal backup and ongoing copying (refreshing) of files. Floppy disk publications are separately copied to CD-R as a more stable carrier. Appropriate storage and handling arrangements are applied to achieve a medium term storage life.
Longer term preservation pathways for dealing with technological change are still problematic. The Library expects to have to migrate software and data to new platforms but the effectiveness of this is largely untested. The Library is also interested in emulation as a way of maintaining access without changing the original format. All proposed pathways require further research and testing.
The Library is maintaining some superseded software and hardware for a period to provide access until more sustainable pathways have been decided.
The Library has counter-disaster plans in place for all material.
Organisation and cooperation
The development of a national cooperative model in Australia is covered in the text. Such a model is built on a history of successful cooperation in the Australian library sector.
The Library is active in a number of standards groups, especially relating to metadata and interoperability protocols.
The Library has done some work on developing effective relationships with publishers. Contact has been established with a large number of individual publishers to negotiate archiving and access arrangements. For physical formats the Library has a developing contact with key publishers and peak bodies, focused on standardising deposit agreements and on steps publishers could take to facilitate preservation.
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