National Library of Australia Staff Papers, 2005

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Selective Archiving of Web Resources: A Study of Acquisitions Costs at the National Library of Australia

Margaret Phillips

Abstract


During the past decade a small but growing number of national libraries have established Web archiving programs. These programs have taken one or more of four main approaches: 1. selective archiving, for example, the archives of the National Libraries of Canada, Japan, and Australia 2. periodic harvesting of the country’s entire Web domain, exemplified by the archives of the Nordic countries, including Sweden 3. thematic collecting, exemplified by the Library of Congress’s MINERVA collections of the Elections 2000 and 2002 and of September 11, 2001 4. deposit collections, such as STORS at the State Library of Tasmania and the e-Depot at the National Library of the Netherlands The National Library of Australia chose the selective approach because of its perceived advantages: 1. Each item in the Archive is assessed for quality and is functional to the fullest extent permitted by current technical capabilities. 2. Each item in the Archive can be fully catalogued and therefore can become part of the national bibliography, and the bibliographic data can be shared. In the Library’s own catalogue, Web resources are integrated with all other resources and users need look in just one place. 3. Each item in the Archive can be made accessible via the Web to readers immediately because permission to do so has been negotiated with publishers. The properties of individual resources and classes of resources within the Archive are known to collection managers. This enhances our ability to develop methods and tools to collect them in the first place, store them, and provide access to them. This knowledge also apprises collection managers of the preservation strategies that will be required to keep the resources accessible for the long term. Sites that are inaccessible to harvesting robots can be identified and gathered using other methods as arranged with the publisher. This includes commercial titles, which may require a publisher-supplied password, and databases. Despite these advantages, each of the archiving approaches has disadvantages, and the selective approach is no exception. It relies on library staff operating in an environment with very new information to judge what will be required for research in the future. It also takes a resource out of context, breaking its links to external resources. From the point of view of archive development and management, the biggest disadvantage is that the process is labour-intensive and the unit cost of each item collected is high.

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