[-empyre-] Introductory post from Paul Koerbin (NLA)

["Paul Koerbin" <pkoerbin@nla.gov.au>]

At the National Library of Australia we began grappling with the problem
of preserving web resources in 1996. This began with determining
actually how we would go about this and indeed examining just what was
out there. At the same time we began developing the technical systems in
order to allow us to undertake the archiving of web resources as
efficiently as possible. The result is the PANDORA Archive
http://pandora.nla.gov.au 
The reason the NLA undertook to do this is because the Library is
charged with preserving Australia's documentary heritage and clearly the
Web has become such an important medium for cultural expression. 

The Library chose to adopt a selective approach to archiving for
practical reasons. Limited resources being an obvious one, but also
because it would allow us to start to do something practical since
selective archiving is scalable. However it does put a lot of onus on
the selection process since we have to determine what we think will be
of long term research value, or at least we have to set priorities (see
the PANDORA selection guidelines at
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/selectionguidelines.html)

As an opening issue I would suggest that we do need to think very
seriously about what we mean by archiving and preservation. As David has
already suggested, how we do this is a big problem. When we are talking
about web resources (html files, image and sound files and so on) we
must expect that these will be obsolete in time and so how do we
continue to access these resources, even if we have archived them
somewhere? Preservation means ongoing access, so if we make a commitment
to preserve something, then we must also develop strategies to maintain
these resources and provide access to them in the future. For example,
this raises issues of maintaining metadata about the resources that will
assist us in the long term preservation process. And if you want to get
your teeth into something really intractable, think about what the
significant properties of a web resource are; that is, suppose that the
resource cannot be maintained in time exactly in its original form, in
order preserve the essential integrity of the resource what could be
sacrificed and what could not? 

These are some of the things that occupy us here in between routinely
downloading sites and archiving them in PANDORA. Some of the main issues
faced in archiving and preserving web sites are discussed in a
presentation I gave at the 2004 Australasian Sound Recordings
Association in May, see http://pandora.nla.gov.au/presentations/asra.doc

Paul


Paul Koerbin
Supervisor
Digital Archiving Section
National Library of Australia

pkoerbin@nla.gov.au
(02) 6262 1411