ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 61 | February 2003
The Continuity of Digital Heritage
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Attendees of the Asia-Pacific Regional Consultation Meeting on the
Preservation of Digital Heritage, held at the National Library of Australia,
November 46, 2002 |
As our lives are increasingly engaged, enrichedor perhaps enraged and clutteredby the digital world, how are we to view the flood of data rushing by us: momentarily interesting but essentially worthless, or worth holding onto?
For UNESCO (the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), the answer is simple: amongst the profusion of digital activity, we are creating a new form of heritage that is an integral part of the inheritance of all people.
According to a resolution passed by the General Conference of UNESCO in November 2001, this digital heritage includes the worlds cultural, educational, scientific, public and administrative resources, as well as technical and medical information (which) are increasingly produced, distributed and accessed in digital forma rich heritage indeed.
Over many decades, UNESCO has taken an active role in encouraging the preservation of various kinds of heritage: natural heritage through the network of World Heritage listings; documentary heritage through the Memory of the World program; and most recently, cultural heritage extending beyond things to include non-material forms, reflected in a proposed Convention on Intangible Heritage.
Prompted by concerns expressed by many member states, UNESCOs General Conference was convinced there is also a digital heritage of enduring value at risk of being lost, unless urgent and appropriate action is taken.
The threats to digital information are familiar to national libraries, including the National Library of Australia, which have been at the forefront of efforts to make digital resources accessible to current and future users.
However, many libraries and archives around the world are struggling to deal with the preservation of these now not-so-new resources. Beyond libraries and archives, the levels of preparedness to take action seem to be even lower.
Effective action is likely to require:
In such an environment, UNESCO has put together a wide campaign aimed at addressing many of the barriers to effective action.
The UNESCO campaign includes widely held consultations on what is needed, development of an international charter on the preservation of digital heritage, preparation of technical guidelines, and a series of pilot projects. If this campaign is successful, it may also encourage action in areas outside UNESCOs direct influence, such as adjustment of legal frameworks and funding of preservation programs.
The NLA has been a partner in this campaign from an early stage. The Library has a leading role in the Council of Directors of National Libraries (CDNL) that proposed and helped frame the originating motion put to UNESCO. Earlier this year, NLA was invited by UNESCOs Division of Information Society to:
The Charter is intended to serve as a declaration of broad principles, based on strong consensus. As explained by Mr Abdelaziz Abid, Senior Program Specialist for the UNESCO Division of Information Society, declarations such as the proposed Charter are not binding on member states but are meant to inspire action. Notably, this Draft Charter talks about the need to preserve the digital heritage of all countries and all regions, not just that of the wealthy or the well-equipped. The Draft Charter recognises that not all digital resources need to be kept, but asserts that the loss of digital heritage materials would waste much of the economic, social, intellectual and cultural potential that is inherent in ongoing use of these resources. It would also deny posterity the opportunity to build on current knowledge, and offer the future a distorted view of history.
The Guidelines on preserving digital heritage materials have quite a different purpose from that of the proposed Charter. While they also need to inspire, they are aimed at providing practical guidance to those responsible for active preservation programs. This guidance needs to take account of a wide range of audiences, circumstances, types of digital resources, and levels of readiness. It also needs to address policy, management and practice issues.
Maintaining continuity of access to digital materials requires an active preservation perspective throughout their life. For this reason, the draft Guidelines address issues from the point of creation through to requests for access at some time in the future when the original means of providing access have long been superseded.
Preparing guidelines to address these goals, in an environment of uncertain technological solutions, is an interesting challenge. This means that many issues must still be approached at the level of underlying principles that could be used to inform decisions, rather than presenting detailed but quickly dated technical information.
In the last two months of 2002, regional consultation meetings were held in Canberra (for the Asia-Pacific region), Managua, Nicaragua (Latin AmericaCaribbean); Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Africa); and Riga, Latvia (Northern Europe). The purpose of these meetings was to allow regional voices to be heard, so that documents such as the Charter and Guidelines could take account of a wide range of needs.
The meeting in Canberra, organised by the National Library of Australia with funding assistance from UNESCO, was held in the Library over three days in early November. Thirty-eight invited attendees from 15 countries represented national, state and academic libraries, records archives, audio-visual archives, specialist research institutes, information studies programs, geoscience data archives, museums, publishers, government, the community development sector, and UNESCO programs.
The meetings enthusiastically welcomed the UNESCO initiatives in the preservation of digital heritage and provided valuable comments on the two draft documents. The meetings also emphasised the diverse circumstances in which digital heritage materials are being created, managed, kept, and in some cases lost. As well as the more obvious examples of digital heritage one would expect to find in the collections of major libraries and archives, the Canberra meeting heard of small, isolated rural communities in Asia using digital technology to document and enrich their culture, creating a new heritage that the communities wished to maintain themselves. The meetings in Nicaragua and Ethiopia recognised the value of digital information as a public resource that should be maintained for the benefit of all. Yet, at the same time, the meetings emphasised the difficulties of small institutions barely able to meet their preservation commitments with traditional collections, let alone take action to look after digital materials.
All meetings expressed a strong desire to build a network of contacts and information that would support cooperative efforts to preserve the emerging digital heritage before it was lost.
What happens next?
Following the regional consultation meetings, Colin Webb, the National Librart of Australias project officer for the UNESCO campaign, has been refining the Draft Charter and Draft Guidelines, taking account of feedback from the meetings and from other individuals invited to comment. Redrafting was due to be completed in early February, for consideration by the UNESCO Executive Board in April, and if recommended for adoption, by the General Conference of UNESCO in October 2003. The draft documents should be available from the UNESCO web site in the first half of 2003.
Given the rapidly changing nature of digital technology, and the
evolution of approaches to maintaining continuity in the digital heritage,
these documents will not be the last word on these issues. However, they mark
the important beginnings of a campaign that will be critical to the survival of
the digital treasuresand good, plain informationthat future
generations should inherit.
Colin Webb
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