National Library Home > News & Events
Gateways

General Assembly of the IIPC Meets at the National Library

The IIPC Steering Committee meeting at the National Library in April
Photo: Loui Seselja

Representatives of libraries, archives and cultural heritage organisations from around the world gathered at the National Library last month to explore the challenges of capturing and ensuring access to content on the Web.

The second General Assembly of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) brought together experts to discuss policies, methods and standards for Web archiving, strategies for preservation and ongoing access, and to collaboratively develop the open-source software tools needed to achieve these objectives.

The Library’s Director of Web Archiving and Digital Preservation, Colin Webb, said that while great progress had been made, the task of preserving important Web content was getting bigger.

By pooling their resources, particularly in the development of open-source software, cultural institutions were better able to collect and save the information for the future. The consortium’s meeting, held from 6–11 April, was an important part of that effort.

National Library Director-General Jan Fullerton said the world risked losing its digital memory and libraries around the world were working together to try to save it:

The Library is a world leader in this area and has saved many notable Australian websites since 1996 but much more needs to be done—and could be done with greater resources and copyright changes to ensure ongoing access to online materials. But without adequate recognition, policy development, planning and investment in research and infrastructure development, much of Australia’s ever-increasing digital memory will be lost.

Colin said the challenge was not just that the Web was growing rapidly but that it was changing its nature from a set of reasonably static interlinking documents, which crawl robots could easily navigate and capture, to an interactive and participative environment in which robots are not able to simulate user navigation. In addition, there was the growing content inside social networks (for example, MySpace and FaceBook) and virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft:

Web archiving practices and tools are struggling to evolve fast enough to meet these challenges. As well as the technical stumbling blocks to capturing this content, there are profound questions of whether social network content should be captured and, if so, how much and what content should be captured.

The National Library was one of the founding members of the IIPC, which seeks to foster international collaboration on preserving internet content for future generations.

Membership has increased from 12 institutions in 2003 to more than 36 today and includes organisations from Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania. For the first time, this year representatives from the national libraries of Japan, Singapore and China were able to attend the general assembly.

Ellen Peterson
Media Liaison Officer, Communications and Marketing