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Digital preservation policy 3rd Edition (2008)

1. Purpose

This policy statement indicates the directions the National Library of Australia takes in preserving its digital collections, and in collaborating with others to enable the preservation of other digital information resources.

The Library’s digital preservation program forms part of its overarching Preservation Program. This policy should be read in conjunction with the Library’s Preservation Policy and other policy documents and guidelines relevant to the way digital resources are created, selected, acquired, described and accessed, which can be found at Policy & planning and Policy and practice statement. Of particular relevance are the Library’s Collection Development Policy, Collection Digitisation Policy, and documents describing web archiving intentions and activities.

2. The objectives of the Library’s digital preservation activities

The Library has a business interest in and commitment to preservation and has been active in developing infrastructure to collect, manage, preserve and keep our digital collections available. This is recognised as ongoing core business for the Library and critical to its future relevance.

The National Library defines digital preservation as the process of maintaining, and if necessary, recovering accessibility to digital information resources.

The Library’s preservation role is guided by our key statutory responsibilities to develop and maintain a national collection of Australian published and unpublished information resources to ensure they remain available for current and future use. The Library recognises digital information resources as a critically important and increasingly large component of our collecting and preservation responsibilities.

The National Library also seeks to help others preserve the digital information resources for which they accept responsibility.

3. The nature of the Library’s digital collections

The National Library began acquiring and creating digital information resources of enduring value in the mid-1980s or earlier. Subject to collecting and preservation agreements that the Library may enter into from time to time with other agencies, the digital information resources for which we currently accept some level of preservation responsibility include:

  • Australian web resources selected for inclusion in PANDORA Australia’s Web Archive, or gathered in periodic harvests of the Australian web domain or through other programs
  • Preservation master copies produced by digitisation of analogue materials from the Library’s collections (and in some cases, from the collections of other institutions)
  • Australian digital publications originally published on physical carriers acquired for the Library’s collections
  • Original unpublished digital files acquired or produced for inclusion in the Library’s Special Collections (Manuscripts, Pictures, Oral History, Maps).

Over time, this list of resource types can be expected to change in response to new business needs and opportunities, and reflect new forms of electronic publishing and communication.

(This policy does not cover analogue electronic materials such as analogue audio or video recordings. However, once such collection materials have been converted to digital form, the digitised versions are subject to this policy.)

4. The challenges of keeping digital information resources accessible

Ongoing access to digital resources is threatened by many challenges. The challenges include:

  • The volume of materials to be maintained
  • The diverse and frequently changing range of file formats and standards, and the changing availability of hardware, software and other technology required for access
  • Widespread use of relatively unstable carriers, subject to short-term media deterioration and data corruption or loss
  • The need for preservation decisions to be made early in the life cycle of digital objects
  • For some materials, relatively long delays between their creation and their being acquired and controlled by the Library
  • Uncertainty about the significant properties or essential characteristics that must be maintained for some digital resources
  • The need to maintain relationships between objects, between parts of complex objects which may be in different formats, and between objects and the metadata that describes them
  • The recurring nature of many of the threats and the short replacement cycles for the Library’s infrastructure for managing digital collections
  • Uncertainty about the strategies and techniques most likely to be effective, and the significant time required to plan and implement any currently available strategies for such diverse and large collections
  • The likely high costs of taking action, and the likely high costs of delaying or not taking action (including the likelihood of loss of access)
  • A mismatch between funding cycles and long term preservation commitments, even for long existing institutions such as the Library, leading to the possibility that some preservation commitments may have to be given priority over others
  • Intellectual property and other rights-based constraints on preservation processes and on the provision of access
  • Administrative complexities in ensuring timely action is taken that will be cost-effective over very long periods of time
  • The need to develop and maintain suitable knowledge and systems to deal with these challenges.

The Library’s digital preservation programs aim to address or at least take account of these challenges.

5. Broad directions for preserving the Library’s digital collections

Scope

It is the Library’s intention to preserve the accessibility and usability of all the digital materials in its collections as described above (under The Nature of the Library’s Digital Collections). However, because of resource pressures the Library may have to allocate priorities for action, based on the relative significance of particular materials and on the technical complexity of preserving access to them.

Preserving accessibility

In preserving accessibility, the Library will:

  • Maintain data at the physical level;
  • Maintain ways of providing access to meaningful digital content which is an acceptable representation of the content as originally collected; and
  • Maintain the ability to find digital objects reliably through the use of persistent identifiers.

Models

The Library believes its digital preservation objectives will be best achieved by developing or adopting practices and infrastructure that comply with a coherent framework for reliable and manageable digital archives.

The Library uses the broad understandings and concepts embodied in the Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) Reference Model [1] as a conceptual check for its own archive construction and management. In developing or adopting relevant systems and infrastructure, the Library aims to operate within the principles of reliable digital repositories as defined by international standards and best practices.

The Library also recognises the value of practical experiments in developing useful new approaches. The Library will continue to develop process models addressing our particular business needs.

6. Implementation principles

Implementation of policy necessarily happens in the context of the infrastructure the Library can provide and the availability of cost-effective solutions. These are influenced by expected rates of growth in the size of the Library’s collections, changes in technologies, and infrastructure replacement cycles.

In implementing this policy with regard to its own collections, the Library will seek to apply certain principles.

With regard to costs and resources, the Library:

  • Recognises that preservation action is an inherent cost of collecting (unless there is an explicit intention not to preserve), and seeks to understand the costs associated with appraising, acquiring, managing and maintain access to digital collection materials
  • Attempts to allocate adequate and appropriate resources and infrastructure for sustained preservation action, but may need to tailor its collecting programs to take account of the ability to preserve and the availability of resources to do it
  • Attempts to ensure sufficient trained staff are available to manage the processes required to preserve our digital collections.

With regard to methods, the Library:

  • Seeks to identify and use appropriate methods to maintain access to the significant characteristics for which our digital collections were collected. Where practical to do so, these methods will be automated
  • Recognises the importance of capturing and maintaining adequate metadata to document our collection materials and what is required to provide access to them
  • Seeks to understand and monitors any significant threats to the accessibility of our collections
  • Stores and manages our digital collections in ways that will ensure their integrity, including adequate and secure backup and disaster recovery safeguards
  • Will maintain and if necessary create access pathways required for specific collections and formats, including any necessary hardware and software components
  • Where practical, will maintain a secure copy of the original byte stream of any digital resources that have been transformed for access or management purposes.

With regard to coordination and planning of the Library's preservation efforts, we:

  • Aim to plan our preservation action proactively, providing sufficient lead time for appropriate infrastructure to be put in place to support the required action
  • Will determine priorities for preservation action where it is necessary to do so
  • Consider the preservation implications of any systems designed or put in place to manage our digital collections
  • Attempt to consider preservation implications in making acquisition decisions, including what is likely to be needed for sustained preservation and access
  • Consider the standards, formats and documentation that are required for our digitisation programs to produce digital objects that can be cost-effectively preserved
  • Seek to establish what is required to operate as a sustainable trustworthy digital repository, and monitor our capability and performance in providing reliable preservation
  • Will determine, on a case by case basis, the preservation responsibility we will undertake in hosting or storing digital materials on behalf of others.

We expect to use a range of approaches to maintaining access to all the digital resources in our care. The Library will choose what appear to be the most appropriate approaches to achieve our preservation objectives.

7. Research and standards development

The Library will continue to encourage and undertake research into areas in which we need more knowledge in order to manage our digital collections effectively. Current knowledge is not adequate to address these policy directions satisfactorily; needs will also change over time.

We will publicise our research priorities with a view to engaging the interest of others who may have a shared interest or be able to help.

The Library also believes that standards have an important role in reliable preservation procedures. The Library will continue to support standards development in Australia and internationally where there are potential benefits to our business needs.

8. Working with others to preserve the nation's digital information resources

The National Library is one of many players with an interest in ensuring the national documentary heritage is preserved and remains accessible. The Library seeks to work with others who are taking, or could take, responsibility for preserving elements of Australia's digital information heritage. In working with such partners, the Library aims to:

  • Identify appropriate partners and stakeholders able to contribute to a national effort
  • Establish agreements on responsibilities and roles that offer a reliable basis for ongoing accessibility
  • Help develop and promote policies, procedures and tools to support such an aim
  • Work with producers and re-users of digital content to encourage practices that will enable, rather than hinder, preservation
  • Work with governments to develop legislative and funding frameworks to enable cost-effective preservation.

9. Working with others to foster digital preservation

The Library places great importance on working with others in Australia and internationally to develop strategies and practices that support digital preservation. The Library aims to:

  • Freely share information on our approaches, systems, strategies, tools and experiences
  • Learn from the experience of others as well as our own experience
  • Support internationally useful mechanisms for comparing approaches and strategies, and for reviewing developments
  • Participate in research and development projects where there is an identifiable benefit to the Library and to others involved in preserving Australia's digital information resources.

The Library has a special responsibility to foster digital preservation efforts in the South East Asia and Pacific regions as part of our role as a Regional Centre of the Preservation and Conservation Core Program of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA PAC).

Contact

The Director of the National Library’s Web Archiving and Digital Preservation Branch is responsible for maintaining this Digital Preservation Policy and for leading its coordinated implementation.

Endnotes

[1] Available at Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (viewed 11 June 2008)

3rd edition: September 2008 (1st edition: July 2001)