[-empyre-] Response to Clare

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

Clare

In response to your question about whether we have a responsibility to
give upgrade a what we are preserving to give it integrity I would say
that we would try to avoid that. Part of the purpose of collecting the
web sites (beside the usefulness of the content of many of them) is to
document web publishing at the time they are archived. It would be our
ambition to be able to present the artefact in the future as it appeared
at the time it was captured. Technology may be upgraded with has
consequences for how this resource may appear in the future of course
and that is why we have seriously grappled with the issue of significant
properties. What is it exactly that we need to preserve. In some ways
our work in this area has led us no further than being able to say the
image-ness of and image and the look and feel of the web site in its
completeness is its significant property. It's a tough question
especially when you may have to make pragmatic decisions in the future
based this. Nevertheless it is valid to say that we aim preserve and
make accessible in the future the artefact as it appear and functions
when captured.

To your other question, we archive a web site when we have become aware
of it and obtained explicit permission from the publisher (copyright
owner) to archive it. So the timing of the initial archiving is
determined by a degree of pragmatism. However, we do then, in many
cases, schedule re-archivings. We do not aim to capture every change to
a web site, but would aim to make sure we capture at some point all the
content. So we look at how the site is changing over time, how stable it
is, whether it retain content online, or if it is removed and replace by
new content. Our scheduling system allows us to set regular archiving
schedules (e.g. monthly, quarterly, annual) and set specific archiving
days. So if we know, in consultation with the publisher/author that
there is a particular day that the site should be captured, we can
manage that. Again, it has to be said, we have to make pragmatic
decisions in regard to resourcing, since the archiving work is quite
resource intensive. Thus we look for longer archiving schedules rather
than shorter. 

Of course there are occasions we have to very timely in our archiving,
for example when are archiving election campaigns, since sites come and
go and change rapidly. We aim to capture that dynamic as far as we can.

As for the publications that are lower priorities, the reality is that
some will disappear before we are able to archive them. Our response to
this is to work hard at developing our archiving system to include more
automation and scalability so that we can capture the Australian web on
a larger scale.

Paul 

Paul Koerbin
Supervisor
Digital Archiving Section
National Library of Australia

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