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  • selected unpublished computer files deposited in the Library’s Manuscripts collection.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.

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