Activities

Digital preservation

Purpose

The purpose of this page is to provide information about the National Library of Australia’s approaches to preserving its digital collections and about its digital preservation activities.

The National Library defines digital preservation as the processes involved in maintaining the required level of accessibility of digital objects over time. The Library believes that this involves a number of critical elements concerning how digital materials are created, selected, transferred, described, and managed.

Within the National Library, the major focus of identifying, collecting and describing digital publications is the archiving of online Australian publications into PANDORA, Australia’s Web Archive. A great deal of information about these steps as they relate to PANDORA can be found on the PANDORA web site.

As well as collecting digital materials and managing them for current access, the National Library is strongly committed to ensuring long term access to those digital collections for which it accepts preservation responsibility. To this end, the National Library:

  • aims to know certain key management information about its digital collections.
  • has developed a Digital Preservation Policy which sets out the principles that guide its digital preservation activities.
  • has developed a Digital Preservation Directions Statement 2008 to 2012 which sets out its digital preservation priorities for the medium term.
  • has undertaken a detailed risk assessment for its digital collections.
  • uses an evolving Digital Preservation Action Plan to prioritise and direct its digital preservation work. (A public version will be made available from this website.)
  • has a long-standing program of projects to develop tools, procedures and infrastructure to manage the preservation of its digital collections.
  • has a long-standing commitment to working with others in developing ways to address its digital preservation responsibilities. Many of these are described under Collaboration on the PANDORA web site. In terms of long-term preservation, the National Library’s collaboration priorities for the period 2004-2006 focus on the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR), and investigating the feasibility of a national digital preservation practitioners’ network.
  • uses a range of means to share information about digital preservation. The most significant of these is the PADI subject gateway (Preserving Access to Digital Information) which is hosted and maintained by the National Library of Australia. The Library is an active member of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) and in 2004 a senior member of the Library’s digital preservation team led the preparation of Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects. The Library also made a significant contribution to the Digital Heritage campaign of UNESCO, preparing Guidelines on Preservation of Digital Heritage, assisting in the drafting of a Charter, and organising a regional consultation meeting for Asia and the Pacific in 2002. The Library is a designated Regional Centre for South East Asia and Oceania for IFLA PAC, and a designated IFLA PAC centre of excellence in digital preservation.

Further information about the National Library of Australia’s digital preservation activities is available from a number of current staff papers prepared for publication or conference presentation.

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