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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 50| April 2001


Preserving the Bits
Involvement in European Digital Preservation Meetings

Preservation 2000 conference in York

From left to right: Colin Webb (NLA), Michael Day (UK Office of Library Networking), Neil Beagrie (Office of the Distributed National Electronic Resource, UK) and Maggie Jones (Arts and Humanities Data Service, UK, formerly of NLA) during a break at the Preservation 2000 conference in York, December 2000

 

In December 2000, while Australian readers were generally turning on their fans, heading for cool shopping malls and thinking of a hot Christmas, Colin Webb, Director of Preservation Services at the National Library of Australia, was visiting a wet and flood-disrupted England and a very wintry Netherlands to attend a series of conferences and meetings about preserving digital collections.

During his travels Colin participated in a one-day workshop in York on the subject of preservation metadata, the information that needs to be recorded so that digital collections can be successfully managed. The Library is one of a number of institutions around the world working together to develop an international standard for this kind of metadata, under the umbrella of a joint working committee of the Research Libraries Group and the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC).

An early outcome of this working group’s work is a state-of-the-art White Paper, available from the OCLC web site at: www.oclc.org/digitalpreservation/, comparing four different schemas prepared by organisations involved in creating and managing digital collections.

Following the workshop, Colin spoke at the Preservation 2000 conference also held in York. This conference, with presentations from digital preservation projects from the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada and the United States of America, as well as Australia, tried to establish some sense of where we stand in finding solutions to the challenges of preserving access to digital information. In particular, the conference was a ‘report back’ from the Cedars Project, a UK project attempting to demonstrate how digital information could be reliably preserved, but it also served as an opportunity to compare the progress and the different approaches of a number of other projects such as NEDLIB (the Networked European Deposit Library), the NLA’s PANDORA archive, and the British Library’s new digital library initiative.

The conference featured an inspiring opening address by Dr Lynn Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, who challenged delegates to work together to develop a manifesto that would guide future research and future lobbying for resources to save the global digital heritage.

Opportunely scheduled just a few days after the York conference, the NEDLIB project held an invitation-only seminar at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library of the Netherlands—known as the KB) at The Hague. This seminar, attended by representatives of every national library in Europe, as well as invitees from libraries in North America and Australia and the IT industry, discussed the achievements of the NEDLIB project, the lessons learned, and the possibilities of future collaborative action.

The NEDLIB project itself came to an end with the seminar, but its achievements included a series of publications describing archiving models explored during the project, and serious investigation of strategies for ensuring ongoing access to digital resources.

The KB, like the British Library, has recently signed a contract with a major IT firm to help develop a digital archiving system, (in the case of the KB, building on the work of NEDLIB, while the British Library program will be built on the work of the Cedars project).

There were many parallels with the NLA in this area, although there was general agreement that NLA had progressed well beyond most other libraries in the world, especially in the area of archiving web-based digital resources. This progress had been achieved largely through the investment in practical development of PANDORA and the Library’s digital preservation initiatives. The NLA’s PADI web site was also widely praised as the essential resource for keeping up to date with developments in this area.

Two aspects of these international meetings were especially encouraging. The first was the obvious willingness to share information openly and to look for opportunities to work together. While different institutions may have some different requirements, at the very least there is much to be gained by learning from each other’s experiences and insights.

The second glimmer of hope was associated with the news that major IT firms are getting involved in research that may make digital preservation easier. Their research concerns emulation, a strategy of making one computer act as if it were a different computer. By developing a specification for a ‘Universal Virtual Computer’ to which any computer may be emulated, it is hoped that emulation may become a feasible strategy for providing access between computer operating systems over long periods of technology changes.

The papers from the York conference and workshop are available on the Web at: www.rlg.ac.uk/events/pres-2000/, while the presentations from the NEDLIB seminar can be viewed at www.kb.nl/coop/nedlib/.

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Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au

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