Staff Papers

Electronic Publications and the Survival of Information

Paper by Maggie Jones Director, Collection Management & Retrieval Service, and Colin Webb Manager, Information Preservation, National Library of Australia

Abstract

Increasingly, important information is being created in digital form. Libraries have traditionally taken responsibility for ensuring continued access to the diverse range of materials which reflect a nation’s cultural heritage. In the digital environment, libraries also have a role to play and need to combine theoretical understandings and overriding principles with solid practical activity in order to overcome the challenges posed by the technology. The issue of preserving important digital information has been recognised worldwide and much activity has been taking place in this area. Projects being undertaken by libraries in Europe, the U.S, and Australia are helping to illuminate the issues and considerable progress has been made in the past few years towards realising a goal in which it is feasible to ensure continued access to cultural heritage in digital form.

Introduction

The purpose of the paper is to:

  1. affirm the need to establish a national system which will guarantee long term access to significant Australian online publishing output;
  2. survey what is happening in this area both here and overseas;
  3. review what has been happening in Australia;
  4. suggest that concerted practical action is the key to further progress.

The National Library of Australia's Position Paper on a National Strategy for Provision of Access to Australian Electronic Publications (1) divided electronic publications into two types, those which are distributed in multiple copies in physical formats, and those which are held on host computers and are accessible through a communications network. This paper will focus on the second category, those which are online.

1) A National System

We are very familiar with a national preservation model which assumes state and National libraries take primary responsibility for guaranteeing the survival of the Australian print publishing output. Increasingly, important material is being generated digitally so there is a pressing need to make the same guarantees for that category of publication. It still requires a national model to do it but one which, because of the nature of the material, may be a variation on the existing model. The National Library of Australia is willing to play a key role in digital preservation, evidenced by support for the PADI Working Group; the NPO conference Capturing the Rainbow; the NPO Principles; the National Library Position Paper, and the work of the PANDORA project. However, we are assuming that there will be other players as well, though who these will be has yet to be determined. The question is, can we adapt the traditional model or is the nature of the material so vastly different we'll need to start completely afresh? At the National Library, we have always assumed that there is no difference in principle, to assuming responsibility for significant Australian digital publications, as there is for Australian print publications. Attention is often focussed on the differences between digital and print publications, and it is certainly important to acknowledge these differences, but there are also similarities in terms of commitment and the role which is already taken on by depository libraries so it makes sense not to have to completely reinvent the wheel when thinking about how a national model might work.

2) What's Happening Overseas?

There has been a lot of activity in this area, particularly in the past two to three years. To begin with, what might reasonably be described as a watershed was the Report of the RLG/CPA Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information (2). The draft report was issued in August 1995 requesting comments, these were addressed by the Task Force and a Final Report came out in May 1996. In a way the Task Force signalled both the complexity and the importance of this issue even at the announcement of its formation, in December 1994 - simply a glance at the 21 member Task Force, comprising experts from libraries, archives, museums, the computer and telecommunications industries, publishers, and copyright made an incredibly impressive list of participants, remarkable both for the pool of talent and also for the incredible diversity of interests they represented. This was a fairly good practical illustration of the complexity of the issues and the need to harness a range of expertise to really come to grips with finding a solution. The Task Force never at any stage promised a neat blueprint for how to proceed but, in their own words:

...We expect that the best use of the work of the Task Force will ultimately be to heighten awareness of the seriousness of the digital preservation problem, its scope and complexity - and its manageability. There are numerous challenges before us, but also enormous opportunities to contribute to the development of a national infrastructure that positively supports the long-term preservation of digital information.

The Task Force Report was clearly very timely and tapped into what was increasingly becoming an issue being grappled with world wide. The following survey is by no means the sum total of work going on in this area but provides an indication of the kind of thinking going on and the synergy in many ways, with what is happening in Australia:

* One of the earliest projects was the Electronic Publications Pilot Project (EPPP) (http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/e-coll-e/edown.htm) (3) at the National Library of Canada. This was active between June 1994 and July 1995 and had four goals,

  1. To identify and understand the issues that libraries encounter when handling on-line collections,
  2. To encourage more NLC staff members to learn about on-line documents,
  3. To help the NLC determine long-term policies on how to handle electronic publications and recommend which areas of NLC should handle these documents,
  4. To use some of the technologies involved in electronic publishing.

By the end of the project 25 titles were included in the NLC's electronic collection with another 21 titles in progress. The project report made at the end of 1995 recommended that the NLC make acquiring and handling electronic publications part of its mainstream library services as soon as possible. The Canadian Library, has adopted a policy of being selective in what electronic publications it acquires and preserves and the Final Report of the project stressed the need for the Library to initiate discussions with the Canadian library and publishing communities in order to develop a cooperative national strategy for the long-term storage of electronic publications.

* The Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries (CIDL)(4) was set up following a national consultative meeting held at the National Library of Canada in March 1997. It's mission is to "promote, coordinate and facilitate the development of Canadian digital collections and services in order to optimise interoperability and long term access to Canadian digital library resources." Twenty five institutions attended the invitation only meeting and they were selected on the basis of having already demonstrated experience in the conversion of materials to digital format, the management of full-text collections of digital materials, and linking to collections managed by other institutions.

The meeting was preceded by a questionnaire which was mounted on the National Library's Web Site. On the question relating to Intention to Archive digitally reformatted collections, 9 respondents (or 32%) stated they had no intention of retaining the digitised material in perpetuity. For the most part these were cases in which the digitised material was scanned for document delivery requests. For digital collections of external resources, 14 (or 78%) respondents had either decided against, or had not resolved the issue of archiving their electronic collections of external resources. Of the four institutions which did plan to archive digital collections of external resources, only one university had actually undertaken any migration from older to newer storage media.

* What was originally the National Digital Library Federation and what is now known simply as the Digital Library Federation (5) was formed in May 1995 when leaders of fifteen of the leading research libraries in the U.S signed an agreement pledging collaboration towards the establishment of a National Digital Library Federation. The press release at this time made reference to “our common belief that problems are best resolved through collaborative practical activity rather then through further theoretical discussion”(6). This is a sentiment which emerges, whether explicitly or implicitly, in all the projects described in this paper. An NDLF Task Force was set up charged with defining specific technical conditions necessary to achieve NDLF objectives. The NDLF (now the DLF) was constituted as a charter organisation in August 1996 and the three point agenda recommended by the Task Force are

  1. the discovery and retrieval of digital information,
  2. intellectual property rights, and
  3. the archiving of digital information.

The press release stated that "Finally, [the DLF Planning] task force stated that the greatest test of adherence to the goal of creating a national digital library very likely is a commitment to preserve culturally significant digital information as a part of the national heritage. In the area of archiving of digital information, it suggested that the Federation should foster and facilitate a commitment to digital archiving among participants".

* The Royal Library, National Library of Sweden commenced the Kulturarw project (7) in September 1996. This project aims to test methods of collecting, preserving and providing access to Swedish electronic documents which are accessible online in such a way that they can be regarded as published. They have decided to take the opposite approach from the Task Force (and indeed to the other projects referred to in this paper) in terms of selection, their aim is to move to eliminating as much as possible the need for human intervention and to make it as much an automatic procedure as possible. The rationale used for this are threefold,

  1. the difficulty of predicting what is important for the future,
  2. the resource intensive nature of a more sophisticated model, and
  3. the plummeting costs of computer memory.

By September 1997, an initial downloading of all document which included "se"(Sweden) in their domain had taken place and had captured 4.8 million URL's obtained from 15,000 web sites. More development work is needed to make sure that these documents can be preserved long term and be made accessible and the team has foreshadowed requiring both more staff and more powerful hardware in order to proceed to the next stage.

* EVA (8) is a project run by the National Library of Finland, which is also the Helsinki University Library. The objectives of the project are to enhance criteria for selecting electronic documents; create channels and mechanisms for acquiring them directly from publishers; create mechanisms for creating "grey" literature from Finnish Web Servers; describe publications bibliographically using Finmarc, Dublin Core and other metadata formats; create an archive for collected documents and software needed to maintain this kind of archive; enhance mechanisms to ensure the authenticity of the collected material and to structure it for search facilities; investigate means for long-term archiving; review the development of norms of legal deposit and copyright concerning electronic material.

The project appears to have started in 1997. Helsinki University Library coordinates the project and offers a production environment for acquiring material direct from publishers and archiving it. Other partners in the project are two universities who are responsible for experimenting with dissertations in electronic form; one University's Masters Program in Digital Media offers expertise in the field of document conversion and digital archiving; the Edita Group (a major Finnish printing and publishing house) offers electronic documents enriched with metadata, and CSC Scientific Computing is in charge of implementing an Internet harvester to collect distributed networked documents.

* The U.K's National Preservation Office commissioned a consultant to investigate attitudes towards responsibility for the preservation of digital data. The investigation was funded by JISC (Joint Information Steering Committee) through the eLib programme, associated with NPO and managed by BLRIC (British Library Research and Innovation Centre). The proposed Model asked the most fundamental questions of all, Who Keeps Them and Who Pays? (9), invited comments in September 1997 and now is being considered further by the Working Group. The model proposes a distributed network of agencies sharing responsibility and coordinated by a specially created National Office for Digital Archiving (NODA).

* Finally, as might be expected, since they were involved in the initial Task Force Report, RLG has continued work in this area. In 1996 a two year project ARCHES - Archival Server and Test Bed (http://www.rlg.org/cgi-bin/print_hit_bold.pl/strat/projarch.html) (10) was begun. This is intended to provide the infrastructure to support RLG's digital initiatives and to "serve as a testbed for collaborative investigation of digital capture and preservation practices." (11)

* The RLG Working Group on Digital Archiving was formed in March 1997 and consists of experts from the U.S, Britain, and Australia. The group has been tasked to formally review and analyse the Task Force Report and to assess the work of similar groups in the UK and Australia. A progress report (12) was prepared in May 1997 which identified six potential areas where an RLG role would be useful to move the collective digital archiving agenda forward. These included exploring centralised versus distributed models, evaluating methods for managing digital archives, developing guidelines for appraisal and selection, developing a mechanism for reviewing and certifying agencies providing digital archiving services, investigating legal and policy implications of certified repositories, and coordinating efforts centred at RLG with efforts in the U.K, Australia, and elsewhere in order to minimise investment and maximise gains.

There are have also been numerous workshops and planning sessions going on around the world. In the U.K, a JISC/British Library Workshop was held in November 1995 to discuss Long Term Preservation of Electronic Materials (13) and invited a member of the U.S Task Force, Margaret Hedstrom to the meeting. In Australia, the National Preservation Office invited two other members of the U.S Task Force, Nancy Elkington and Micheal Lesk, to give keynote papers at the NPO's conference, Capturing the Rainbow (14), held in November 1995 which focussed on digital preservation issues. Following the conference, these and the other keynote speaker Michael Alexander, from the British Library, were invited to a Workshop in December 1995 out of which a set of Principles for the Preservation of and Long Term Access to Australian Digital Information (15) was ultimately developed. In the U.S, Peter Graham presented a session at the Fall '97 CNI Taskforce (16) meeting in Minneapolis in order to provide a forum for input from the CNI Task Force representatives to aid in planning the content of workshops which will focus on digital archiving issues. All of these activities point to the growing importance of this issue worldwide.

3) What is Happening in Australia

There has been a growing interest in this issue in Australia, evidenced by the activity of various Commonwealth and State libraries and archives, and by the involvement of the Australian Vice-Chancellor's Committee's Electronic Publishing Working Group. In 1994, the Working Group commissioned a position paper on library and archival issues associated with electronic publishing, including preservation (17) In 1996, the AVCC also provided funding to the PADI Working Group for a consultancy which led to a cross sectoral survey of the preservation intentions of a range of institutions involved in collecting and generating digital information, and from that the setting up of the PADI website to be discussed in a following paper. The AVCC Working Group has also provided funding to assist in the development of the National Library's digital archiving project, PANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked DOcumentary Resources in Australia) . Also in 1996, the Conservation Working Party of the Heritage Collections Committee of the Cultural Ministers Council commissioned a series of papers aimed at advancing the National Conservation and Preservation Policy on Moveable Cultural Heritage. This inevitably included a paper on the implications of changes in technology (18) as well as a wide range of other aspects of the policy. Representatives from a wide range of stakeholders, including the museums, library and archives sectors came together for a Forum held in October 1996 to discuss the full range of issues involved in ensuring the preservation of Australia's cultural heritage in all its forms.

The National Library's own involvement has been growing from the early 1990's. In 1995 a small Committee was set up to establish selection guidelines for online digital publications which the Library would seek to ensure would remain accessible. In 1996, the Library took the next logical step, embarking on an online preservation pilot, later to become known as the PANDORA project. PANDORA is a large and complex exercise that has been through a number of phases, growing from a small internal team looking at possibilities, to a much more public process when it received AVCC funding and an advisory panel early in 1997. The project has been widely reported, and there is only time here to give a brief overview - why we are doing it, what we hope to achieve, broadly how we are doing it, some of the lessons we are learning, and some general comments about what it means to us. A much more detailed description, and the PANDORA archive itself can be found on the NLA web site (19).

Why did the Library believe it needed to get involved with this kind of material? We believed - and still believe - that there needs to be arrangements in place to ensure a pathway for long term accessibility of Australian online publications. Among our reasons for involvement in these are:

  • We hold diverse non-digital collections including print, manuscripts, ephemera, oral histories, pictorial material, broadly aiming to reflect significant aspects of Australian society. We believe that electronic publications should be seen as another information source to be integrated with existing sources.
  • We think it is important to reflect a new publishing medium - a new communication paradigm, often described as the greatest change in publishing since the invention of printing.
  • We believe some of the information in this medium will have long term research value.
  • Such material is very much at risk of being lost if some action isn't taken to preserve access in some way;
    • many sites often change content significantly, with non-current content being removed;
    • many "publication sites" are themselves short lived;
    • all sites, even longer term ones, are subject to risks of catastrophic loss;
    • there has been considerable confusion about terms like "archiving" and there is some potential for valuable information to be discarded when use levels drop below a threshold set for storage needs instead of longer term usefulness or demand.
  • Libraries are by no means the only organisations likely to play a role in digital archiving digital information, but libraries are likely to have more motivation than most for maintaining ongoing accessibility into the distant future.
  • We also wanted to be able to assess, and tell our supporting community about, just what is likely to be achievable and at what cost.

The PANDORA project has been an experiment. By the time this paper is delivered, the Library will have made some firm decisions about whether to pursue the models developed in this project.

What We Hope To Achieve

The primary objective of PANDORA is to capture, archive and provide long term access to significant online publications selected for national preservation.

Broadly How We Are Doing It

To achieve the primary objective, we have set up mechanisms to find what is being produced, establish our views on what should be preserved, catalogue it onto the Australian Bibliographic Network, and negotiate capture and access arrangements with the publisher or creator. We then work out a capture or gathering regime, and use software to harvest the publication automatically . Depending on our specification, this may be as it is published or as a regular snapshot. The captured files are attached to the metadata needed for long term access and management, and loaded into a database, with the metadata placed in a linked metadata repository. Access is provided via the NLA Server and through our Web-based catalogue, with pointers to the publisher's "live" site while it exists, and to our archived copy, in accordance with negotiated access rules. As the archive builds, it is backed up and migrated in accordance with established IT practice in the Library.

Some Of the Lessons We Are Learning

There are many lessons to be learnt in such an exercise. One lesson we have learned from this and from other electronic library projects, is that things are both easier and harder than they first appear.

At every stage of coming to grips with electronic publications we have had to look for concepts and models that simplify an immensely complex landscape. In PANDORA and its support processes, we have recognised many useful models familiar to us from the print world. Models which don't elucidate everything but do provide some light. We are dealing with some everyday concepts for librarians and other information professionals used to developing collecting policies, classifying and cataloguing information; providing access that takes account of intellectual property rights; recognising and managing risks of loss. In all of these areas, we have been able to say "What we know from the print world is a good starting point". Formulating basic principles has been critical in recognising where we need to go, and in encouraging us to have the will and the courage to go through the gate and head out towards the horizon.

At the same time, as they say, "the devil is in the detail". If PANDORA is a box, it is also made up of many boxes, each one full of challenging dilemmas and decisions. These challenges have been with us every step of the way. When we try to classify publications, they change. When we try to negotiate access arrangements, we find publishers with specific demands that we simply cannot afford to administer one by one. When we try to specify what to gather, we find layers of links that have to be sorted out or gathered or rejected. When we gather, we find that our harvesting software brings back less than we wanted, or more than we wanted, filling up our storage space with weekly updates of the same information. When we try to place the information in a database, we find we have to design a structure that works for every publication, for those administering it, and integrates with the Library's other systems (Digital libraries and archives cannot afford to have dozens of unintegrated packets of storage and systems when their core business is increasingly to provide linked, rapid, searchable, and secure access and retrieval). When it comes to providing access there are layers of complexity about who sees what and under what conditions, let alone how they will find it and access it.

When we store the archived files, we find we have to decide on file names and directory structures that will work as long as we plan to keep the files. We even find that our IT procedures are not scaled to keep the archive available and visible, and have to be modified to accommodate it. And this is before we have even started cross technology migration. When we do we will be confronted with publications that may not have the look and feel they had before, and may not even work at all in a different operating environment.

All of this information comes with , and is managed through, more information. Descriptions, decisions, instructions, all the things embodied in the word "metadata". These layers of metadata also need to be managed in logical ways that support the database, make the publications findable, and help us manage all the processes involved in ensuring ongoing preservation.

In the meantime, there is ongoing debate and discussion about what copyright means in the digital environment. The National Library made a joint submission with the National Film and Sound Archive on Legal Deposit to the Copyright Law Review Committee (20) and is keenly interested in participating in discussions on this issue. These activities are occurring simultaneously with the work of PANDORA but there is of course acute consciousness within the PANDORA team of the need to maintain an awareness of what is happening in this area and to ensure that the archiving model takes account of intellectual property rights.

If this sounds like a litany of difficulties, it is. They are not sufficient reason to throw one's hands in the air, but they are difficulties indeed. The bright side is that every difficulty addressed is a lesson learnt, helping us to build a workable digital archive based on sound and understandable principles, and dealing well with the required level of complexity.

In establishing the required concepts and in working with the details, we have relied heavily on modelling - trying to map all the relationships between the processes, the database structures, and the metadata. For most of 1997 this has been our main focus, trying to get it right in a way that will work for more than the few titles that had been taken into the archive already (30 at the time of writing).

Some General Comments About What It Means To Us

We still don't know that this is the best way of doing things, but as we go further into it and explore more options, and study more models being used elsewhere, we are increasingly convinced that this is the way we need to proceed.

We don't believe we can leave it to someone else, saying it's not our business. We don't believe we can just hope it will happen. We don't think we can try to capture everything over and over and still provide useful access to it. We believe we have to solve problems as we go along. This has meant not waiting until everything is sorted out before we start, recognising that we will make some mistakes and follow some paths that turn out not to be worth following. But it also means putting resources into identifying potential problems and doing our best to solve them as we go.

4) Cooperation and Coordination

We want to work with others in this. Creators are playing a significant role, negotiating with us about capture and access. In some cases we have been able to establish a dialogue about the standards and formats they are using, and about what they want to survive from their publications. This allows us to work together to develop best practice for publication. Although there are some real constraints limiting our ability to accommodate these diverse needs, this contact with creators is incredibly helpful to us, bringing together our professional expertise and institutional commitment with the extraordinary diversity and creativity of producers.

Some producers are in a position to go beyond this, based on their own long term interest in maintaining what they produce. We need to be identifying these producers, confirming their commitment to their own material, and discussing what might happen when their interest in maintaining their own material changes.

There are also many archiving partners active in this field. Again, for many their current archiving role is based on their own immediate interest, such as an interest in collecting and archiving information from a specific field of research, or from a specific geographic area. As much as we are proud of PANDORA, we recognise that it is only part of what is needed, even at the archiving end of the process - we cannot archive and preserve everything ourselves that the community may wish to be preserved. We need to make opportunities to tell each other about our intentions, what we are doing, how we can work together to make sure we are preserving access to what will be needed.

We are not necessarily looking for partners who will do things exactly as we do them in PANDORA; we are not necessarily looking for partners who can make a commitment to maintain access forever, but we are looking for partners who will frankly and honestly discuss what they are doing, and who will commit themselves to working with us. That may mean simply defining what they will collect, what their preservation intentions and capabilities are, and agreeing to negotiate realistically about the fate of their collections before they go off the air.

In that scenario, we can envisage a network of archiving sites, some large, some small, some long term, some quite short term, covering all or most of what the community thinks should be preserved from this ongoing explosion in information publishing. The key elements in such a network will be interest, commitment, communication, continuity, and capacity. We believe that the National Library has a leading role to play, but that there are others who will want to preserve with us, either through PANDORA, or through some other, more diverse national archiving model.

We talk a lot about cooperation and collaboration within the library community and this is a good time to assess what we mean by those terms in the digital world. On the one hand they seem especially relevant to the digital environment as the need to share expertise and experience is clearly of great benefit here. On the other hand, changes in the political and economic environments in which we operate, as well as changes in technology, can place barriers in the way of cooperation, in terms of potentially conflicting demands and priorities placed on us. It may be that cooperation in a digital world has a more hard edged feel to it, prompted more by pragmatism and pressure to demonstrate efficiencies than by philosophical inclinations. Nevertheless it is clear from our own experience and what is happening overseas, that cooperation and collaboration are key elements in the ability to make rapid progress.

No one institution, indeed no one sector, is going to have all the answers, the membership of the U.S Taskforce on Digital Archiving is a graphic illustration of the range of stakeholders who need to be engaged in thinking through the complexities of this issue. The membership of the PADI Working Party is another example of the sense it makes to work together across sectors. There are also other mechanisms for ensuring that the wheel is not constantly being reinvented. There are, for example regular liaison meetings between the National Library and Australian Archives and the National Film and Sound Archive so there is a lot of cross fertilization of ideas and information even though there still needs to be activity going on within each sector. The illustrations from overseas reflect a similar process whereby there is much linking across sectors, but actual projects tending to be undertaken within sectors, reflecting the need for each sector to work through its own requirements before working out where these will need to differ from what is happening in other sectors and where they logically intersect.

The following observations can be drawn from experience in Australia and overseas:

  • Initiatives to date have been taken on by major institutions, such as national libraries and/or major university libraries, who have both existing infrastructure to draw on and existing commitment to preservation
  • No-one has claimed to have a definitive solution - there is no "right" way to preserve digital information (and may never be)
  • There is nevertheless a need to approach the task systematically and from a clear set of guiding principles
  • There is a strong commitment for the need for cooperation and some moves towards making these quite formal agreements (CIDL - participants self select on the basis that they will be expected to contribute funds, expertise, advice and/or willingness to work to resolve issues; DLF members have undertaken to provide institutional staff time and travel and annual financial contributions to support a program officer and research associate)
  • There is a gathering momentum of time for action in resolving the practical issues notwithstanding the need for further research to continue simultaneously
  • There is increasing "globalisation", everyone is aware of the work being undertaken by others and are keen to learn from each other and work together. The Internet provides both an easy mechanism as well as a strong imperative for sharing of information and experience.

5) Summary

The NLA has made it clear that it is both willing and able to play a key role in guaranteeing the long term survival of selected Australian electronic publications. It has also made it clear that it does not see itself as the sole player in this. The practical experience of the PANDORA project will hopefully assist those who have a vested interest in maintaining Australian electronic publications aswell as those who have traditionally (like the NLA) assumed responsibility for maintaining the publishing output of Australia, in determining what resources are required to undertake this role, and how best the various levels of responsibility can evolve into a national system.

Notes

(1) National Library of Australia. National Strategy for Provision of Access to Australian Electronic Publications: A National Library of Australia Position Paper [online]. [Canberra, Australia]: September 1996. National Library of Australia Position Paper [online]. [Canberra, Australia]: September 1996. Available from : http://www.nla.gov.au/policy/paep.html

(2) Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information commissioned by the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group. [online]. May 1996. National Library of Australia Position Paper [online]. [Canberra, Australia]: September 1996. Available from: http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/

(3)National Library of Canada. The Electronic Publications Pilot Project (EPPP). Final Report (http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/e-coll-e/edown.htm) [online]. June 1995.

(4) National Library of Canada. Canadian Initiatives on Digital Libraries(CIDL) Home Page. [online].

(5) Digital Library Federation. Home Page. [online].

(6) America’s Heritage: Missions and Goals for a National Digital Library Federation. Commission on Preservation and Access Newsletter. June 1995, Number 80. p.5-7

(7) Royal Library, National Library of Sweden. Kulturarw Project Home Page. [online].

(8) Helsinki University Library - the National Library of Finland. EVA Home page.[online].

(9)Consultation on the Responsibility for Digital Archiving was accessible via <http://www.homepage.demon.co.uk/>during the consultation period but subsequently removed. It is assumed the U.K NPO Home Page (http://portico.bl.uk/services/preservation/) will carry updates of progress.

(10) Research Libraries Group. Arches - Archival Test Server and Test Bed. (http://www.rlg.org/cgi-bin/print_hit_bold.pl/strat/projarch.html) [online].

(11) Erway, Ricky. Digital Initiatives of the Research Libraries Group. D-Lib Magazine, December 1996. [online].

(12) Research Libraries Group. RLG Preservation Working Group on Digital Archiving Progress Report. May 1997. [online].

(13) University of Warwick. Long Term Preservation of Electronic Materials: a JISC/British Library Workshop. November 1995. [online]. (British Library R & D Report 6283).

(14) National Preservation Office. Multimedia Preservation: Capturing the Rainbow. Proceedings of the Second National Conference of the National Preservation Office, Brisbane, 28-30 November 1995. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1996.. A modified version is also available from: http://www.nla.gov.au/niac/meetings/npo95.html

(15)National Preservation Office. Principles on the Preservation of and Long-Term Access to Australian Digital Objects. [online].

(16) Coalition for Networked Information. Fall 1997 Task Force Meeting. [online].

(17) Australian Vice-Chancellor’s Committee. Key Issues in Australian Electronic Publishing: Collected Reports. Electronic Publishing Working Group, Australian Vice-Chancellor's Committee 1995-1996. Canberra: AVCC, 1996. Also available from: http://www.adfa.oz.au/EPub/key/Opening.html

(18) Webb, C. Future Directions in access and preservation technologies and new electronic formats. Discussion paper addressing Policy Statement 6 of the National Conservation and Preservation Policy for Moveable Cultural Heritage. Developing a National Strategy. The Conservation Working Party of the Heritage Collections Committee of the Cultural Ministers Council. Canberra, October 1996.

(19) National Library of Australia. PANDORA project. [online].

(20) National Film and Sound Archive/National Library of Australia. Submission to the Copyright Law Review Committee on Legal Deposit. August 1995. [online].

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