ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 56 | April 2002
International Symposium on Web Archiving
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| Mr Masao Tobari, Librarian of the National Diet Library, with his senior staff, welcoming international guests to the International Symposium on Web Archiving |
Recognising that rapid growth of information resources on the Internet is providing libraries, especially deposit libraries, with great challenges, the National Diet Library of Japan invited a number of libraries with experience in the development and practice of web archiving to Tokyo to a symposium in January 2002. The participating libraries were the National Diet Library, the Library of Congress, the Royal Library of Denmark and the National Library of Australia. Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive was invited as keynote speaker. The symposium focused on the technical and legal issues relating to collecting, preserving and providing access to web resources. Ensuring long-term access to online publications is a costly business and learning from each other means that duplication of effort can be avoided.
The work of the Royal Library of Denmark is of great interest to the National Library of Australia for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is subject to restrictive legal deposit legislation, which Australia would do well to avoid if it is to continue to develop the National Collection of Australian Online Publications (the PANDORA Archive) along the broad lines already established.
On the other hand, there are some very positive developments in Denmark, and the National Library of Australia eagerly awaits reports of the results of their research. In conjunction with other Nordic libraries, the Royal Library is participating in the netarchive.dk project, one of the aims of which is to test different approaches to archiving and the resultant usability of the archived resources. Various archiving methods are under experimentation (for instance, using a harvesting robot versus having the files sent by the publisher via ftp or on disk). Different types of harvesting software are being tested on a variety of resources. Another project, the Nordic Archiving Project, is focusing on the development of software that will facilitate access to resources in the national archives of the various Nordic countries. This involves designing an infrastructure to enable a search engine to search files stored in different formats and to search across archives.
The Library of Congress has developed a prototype of its Minerva Archive (Mapping the INternet Electronic Resources Virtual Archive) that is similar in concept to the PANDORA Archive. It is a selective archive of quality-controlled publications, judged to be of long-term research value. The Minerva user interface is modeled on the PANDORA user interface. The Library of Congress will supplement this selective archive with other more automatic archiving methods to take a more inclusive sweep of online publications of the United States of America. The Library of Congress and the Internet Archive have formed a successful partnership to develop archives on particular topics such as the national election and the events of 11 September.
The National Diet Library of Japan describes itself as being on the starting line in terms of web archiving. It has developed a plan to collect, archive and prepare a bibliography of web resources and is developing a system to store and manage them. Initially it will concentrate on publications that are similar in presentation to print, especially government publications.
Further information about the symposium, including the text of some of
the papers, is available on the Internet at
www.ndl.go.jp/e/ndl_frm_site_7_1.html
Margaret Phillips
| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au