Digital preservation
Management
It is easy to be daunted by the challenges of digital preservation. While knowledge is by no means a complete answer, understanding what the collections contain and their characteristics has proven to be a good starting point for understanding the problems that have to be addressed.
Digital collections
The digital collections for which the Library has accepted a preservation responsibility can be classified as follows:
- PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive that contains Australian online publications which have been selected for preservation by the National Library or its PANDORA partners.
- Australian digital publications originally entering the National Library’s collections on physical carriers such as magnetic discs, tapes or optical discs (e.g. CD-ROMs), that are selected for preservation by the Library.
- digital audio items acquired or created as part of the Library’s Oral History and Folklore or Music collections.
- preservation master copies of collection materials generated by the Library’s digitisation program.
- selected unpublished computer files deposited in the Library’s Manuscripts collection.
- original digital images acquired for the Pictures collection.
- digital spatial data sets and mapping resources acquired for the Maps collection that have been selected for preservation by the Library.
- digital versions of transcripts of the Library’s Oral History recordings.
- the Library’s corporate records in digital form, including components of the Library’s website that are selected for long-term retention.
- digital materials held on behalf of other partners.
- information resources listed on the PADI subject gateway that are selected and approved for ‘Safekeeping’ by the Library.
- metadata records that are required for long-term retention.
The information we aim to know about our digital collections
The Library regularly collects the following collection management information about its various digital collections:
- the number of ‘titles’ (and in the case of PANDORA, the number of ‘archived instances’ of titles)
- the number of files
- the number of file types
- the total ‘byte size’ of the collections
- the software required to provide access to items in the collection.
