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A New Version of the PANDORA Digital Archiving System

On 27 June the National Library deployed Version 3 of its web archiving workflow management system known as PANDAS (http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pandas.html).

PANDAS—the term is a derivation of ‘PANDORA Digital Archiving System’—was created by the National Library and first released in June 2001. A second version was released a year later, in August 2002. The system manages the curatorial workflows associated with the selective archiving of Australian web resources for the PANDORA Archive. This includes recording selections, scheduling the harvesting of content, managing quality assurance procedures, processing the harvested content and metadata in archival packages, and preparing a display copy of archived resources for viewing through the PANDORA website (http://pandora.nla.gov.au/).

The National Library developed the PANDAS software itself because of the need for a purpose-built system to manage the specialised web archiving workflow. It was built with an interface accessible through a web browser to enable cooperative web archiving activity with PANDORA participant agencies (http://pandora.nla.gov.au/partners.html) located throughout Australia. Having begun web archiving activities in 1996, the National Library is recognised as one of the world leaders in developing workflows for selective web archiving in the library community. PANDAS was perhaps the first such software to be developed to manage selective web archiving workflows in an enterprise setting, and it was used by the UK Web Archiving Consortium (http://info.webarchive.org.uk/) to enable the first phase of its web archiving project.

The redevelopment of PANDAS for Version 3 was a considerable undertaking as it involved a complete re-engineering of the software, with the primary objective being to achieve increased efficiency and stability in system performance. In addition, a number of significant enhancements were incorporated into the redevelopment. This included a new interface with improved navigation and, most notably for the web archiving curators, the introduction of personal ‘worktrays’ that greatly enhance their ability to manage tasks effectively through all the workflow stages. Another major enhancement delivered with PANDAS Version 3 is the ability to archive the same title multiple times on the same day, a functionality that was not possible in earlier versions of the system.

The many staff from the Library’s Information Technology Division who were involved in the PANDAS Redevelopment Project deserve acknowledgement for their effort in helping this project to completion. Particular credit is due to the small team that led the project with great dedication through the last, very busy months of programming and data migration: Vinita Tuteja, Joseph Curtis, Alex Osborne and Matthew Walker.

Paul Koerbin
Manager, Web Archiving & Digital Preservation Branch