Blog

And we continue with another session on harvesting approaches for Web content archiving and preservation. We begin with Martha Anderson from the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress. Its problems are probably larger than those of most other libraries - there is no clearly defined country domain, and the volume of material is of course significantly higher than in most other countries.

The library therefore takes a thematic approach to its collection - both identifying ongoing themes and time-bounded issues (elections, the 11 September attacks, etc.). The goal of such selection is to save as much as possible with limited resources, and preserving the context of content as much as this can be achieved. At this point, the LoC is required to seek permission to display and (in the case of event-based harvest) to collect. In doing so, it attempts to leverage its institutional resources to achieve a higher volume of coverage.

We've now moved into the second day in Canberra; this is kicked off by Abby Smith, Director of the Council on Library and Information Resources in the US, speaking on the future of Web resources. She suggests that the strategies for selection and preservation by libraries will need to be rethought; here, the barriers to the creation of content are now unprecedentedly low, while those to persistence of information and unusually high, while library approaches so far have been based on a scarcity of archivable material, but relatively easy archivability.

The Web is massive in scale, highly dynamic and unstable, and riddled with hardware dependencies. How is it to be dealt with - what to preserve, for how long, and for whom? Cooperation and coordination between collecting institutions here will be difficult, even if it may be desirable; access is always a service for a specific community, and there may be no universal, global needs upon which to build. Cooperation is highly problematic in collecting, and at best it may mean that the aggregation of local collections will enable a solid combination of material in a broad range of fields.

The next session is chaired by Alex Byrne, the president-elect of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. His role here is to frame the next session which will present some responses from cultural institutions to the problems raised today. IFLA itself is interested in forging partnerships involved in the preservation of networked resources. Let's see how long my battery lasts through his and the following talks.

Jim Michalko, President of the Research Libraries Group, is the first speaker. He notes that what's available on the Web now are the current and future materials of research, and it is necessary to make and keep this material available through preservation and archiving mechanisms. Collective action is the appropriate way forward to achieve this, and he notes that the NLA has taken some very useful steps which should be taken up far more widely than they have.

And we're on to the next session - I'm speaking in this group, so of course I'm only blogging the other two (my Powerpoint for the presentation is already online). Timothy Hart from Museum Victoria is the first speaker; he notes that museums do receive a significant number of Web visitors who engage in some detail with their content. What about preserving their sites, though? While the museum collections are of course valued, the Websites aren't necessarily.

Australian Museums On Line (AMOL) started much of the drive to put museums on the Web (and will soon become Collections Australia Network (CAN)); there are also bodies like Museums Australia which contribute to the process. Early on, there was much experimentation, but a reduction in funding has contributed to a gradual slowdown here.

Tim Mackey of Geoscience Australia is next, speaking on maps and the impact of the Internet. His organisation has a significant amount of data (some 500 terabytes, growing by 150 TB per year), and aims to make a significant quantity of this material available online. Historically, of course, such spatial data would have been available in hardcopy and updated on a yearly basis, while now it is electronic and Internet-accessible and updated almost daily. Archive and versioning management therefore become crucial issues. Every client of Geoscience Australia, in effect, will receive a different map.

The keynote speaker this morning is Malcolm Gillies, the DVC (Education) at Australian National University. He provides a brief history of cultural transmission, from remembered oral tradition to the emergence of the written word (which suffered its first tragedy with the demise of the library at Alexandria). Massive duplication through printing made text less vulnerable to loss, and gave information a tangible form. Now, however, digitisation has made information intangible again, as well as flexible and ephemeral.

Forms of communication have multiplied and diversified with the new electronic and digital networks, and only a few of these are being covered by archives and libraries so far. This may constitute an 'archival dark age', Malcolm suggests. (This, indeed, already started with earlier electronic forms - the thermal fax, early digital music recordings, etc.). The Web only intensifies this problem - and there is also a problem of overlap between it and other forms of communicaton.

Mower MagicWell, here I am at the National Library in Canberra - and the first thing that greeted me is a large peace sign mowed into the lawns across Lake Burley Griffin from Parliament House. Nice work.