National Library of Australia  - Gateways

ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 72 | December 2004


PANDORA: Australia’s Web Archive Highlighted at International Forums

The National Library of Australia’s (NLA) web archiving activities were highlighted internationally when Paul Koerbin, Supervisor of the Digital Archiving Section, delivered a presentation on the PANDORA Archive <http://pandora.nla.gov.au/> as part of the 2004 Library Science Talks series in Switzerland, and presented a paper at the 2004 International Web Archiving Workshop in Bath, United Kingdom.

The National Library was invited to give a presentation on the PANDORA Archive as part of the 10th anniversary series of the Swiss Library Science Talks. The presentations were delivered at the Swiss National Library in Bern on 20 September, and at CERN in Geneva on 21 September. The Swiss National Library, having launched its own project to establish a digital archive, the e-Helvetica project, was particularly interested to learn of the NLA’s experience in developing and implementing a functional and publicly accessible web archive.

Before arriving in Switzerland Paul presented a paper on PANDAS (PANDORA Digital Archiving System) at the 2004 International Web Archiving Workshop <http://www.iwaw.net/04/index.html>. The Workshop is a forum for web archiving specialists to present case studies and research and development activities and is held in conjunction with the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL). PANDAS is a specialised and unique web archiving workflow management system developed by the NLA that has attracted international interest. The paper presented at the Workshop is available at <www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/2004/koerbin2.html>.

Paul also participated in the first meeting of the International Internet Preservation Consortium’s (IIPC) Researchers Requirements Working Group (</www.netpreserve.org/>) which convened at the British Library on 18 September. The Working Group aims to bring together researchers and participants from major libraries involved in web archiving to work towards a common vision and purpose in the way web archives are developed. Other working groups of the IIPC also held their meetings from 18–20 September. Monica Berko of the NLA attended these groups and is leading the Deep Web working group whose objective is to identify strategies and produce tools for archiving web content which is inaccessible to crawlers.
—Paul Koerbin, Supervisor, Digital Archiving Unit

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