3.0 National Surveys

3.1 Australia

3.1.1 National Context

The Commonwealth of Australia has a system of federal and state governments. This is mirrored in its library system. There is a National Library in Canberra and libraries in the states and territories supported by local government. Australia has, in other words, a distributed system of national and regional library collections.

There is no explicit national legal deposit for electronic publications in Australia, although it is anticipated that this will be introduced in due course. There is some provision for deposit in legislation in some states.

The NLA has a responsibility for preserving the national print-based and oral documentary heritage under the National Library Act, but ScreenSound Australia is responsible for film, sound, and broadcast. ScreenSound and NLA are working jointly on proposals to extend legal deposit legislation to electronic materials and audiovisual materials in physical formats.

Australia has a strong digital online culture. Internationally, Australia has one of the highest levels of Internet connections among its population (surpassed only by the United States and Singapore). In part, this reflects the distances between population centers across the continent and the need for organizations to reach many of their audiences online. For a country with a relatively small population, Australia has a relatively large number of leading-edge online projects across all sectors. Archiving these online materials has become a significant area of effort for Australia's memory institutions, and both the NLA and the national archive activities and guidelines are frequently cited internationally as exemplars in this area.

There are few large international publishers in Australia. Most commercial Australian publishing is focused on print publications. Online publishing has tended to be from new entrants to the market and noncommercial sources. There are 85 commercial publications within the national online collection, PANDORA, but this is a small part of the collection as a whole.

The National Office for the Information Economy in the Federal Government set a target for all federal services to be online by 2001. There has been a major push to enable rapid access to information and services from government departments.

There is an active electronic records management/archive sector in Australia. Work at Monash University, the PRO of Victoria, and the National Archive of Australia has earned an international reputation.

Australia has a national bibliographic database, KINETICA, and Australian libraries collaborate in its development for resource sharing. There has been a tradition of collaboration in developing the national catalog, and this has provided a foundation for collaboration in other fields.

3.1.2 The National Library of Australia

The NLA has a staff of 492 full-time equivalents and is a statutory authority within the portfolio of the Department of Communications, Information Technology, and the Arts. Its 2001 budget was $AU 206.7 million, of which $AU 45 million supported operational expenses.

The NLA's remit covers Australia's published and documentary heritage, and its sound holdings include oral and folk history.

Development of Digital Systems in NLA

1. Digital Object Storage System. This was procured externally and built from a number of subcomponents. It was installed and accepted in June 2001.
2. Digital Objects Management System. This is being built in-house to manage both archived electronic publications and digitized objects in the NLA collections. It is a phased development, and future releases will incorporate digital sound and long-term preservation management.
3. Digital Archive System. This software is being developed in-house to support PANDORA, the national distributed archiving system for online publications. There is Web access to all functions to facilitate involvement and use by partner organizations. Version 1 has been implemented and is highly regarded by NLA partners such as the State Library of Victoria. It has substantially reduced staff time needed to archive online titles. Version 2, scheduled for release in June 2002, will also support distributed storage for any partner that requires it.

Funding

All digital preservation activities at NLA have been supported by a reallocation of internal resources rather than by new funding. As a result, there has perhaps been greater emphasis on mainstreaming these activities within the library than there might have been if this work had been externally financed. Reallocating resources has been difficult, but there is now a core commitment to preservation activities in NLA.

Given limited funding, NLA has invested heavily in staff time and infrastructure to support collaborative archiving and is seeking to develop distributed responsibility for these activities.

NLA Digital Preservation Policy and Action Plan

The following digital preservation technologies are being evaluated:

• File format migration. The NLA is testing the migration of the PANDORA collection to html v4.01.
• Emulation. The NLA is developing a testbed for obsolete DOS systems.
• Web domain harvesting. A feasibility study on harvesting the Australian Web domain, initiated in 2001, is on hold.
• Data recovery. Work on recovery and transfer from floppy disk and CDs is documented in NLA staff papers.
• Viewers for obsolete formats. The library has purchased TRIM software from Tower systems for its records-management needs. It is evaluating the functionality of this software for viewing obsolete word processing formats.
• CD-R and mass-storage systems. The NLA has extensively evaluated CD-R as an archival medium. This work is documented in staff papers.
• Software repositories and technology watch. NLA is evaluating concepts for a software repository and a technology watch for file formats.

3.1.3 National and Institutional Initiatives

National bodies in different sectors are leading several national or institutional initiatives in Australia. National initiatives do not exist in all sectors (even institutional initiatives may be absent).

NLA initiatives are coordinated either through model agreements with trade bodies or through formal or informal bilateral arrangements with individual organizations. Formal arrangements may be made on the basis of institutional mission, geography (e.g., national or state), or by subject matter (archival records, publications, film, and broadcast or audio). The load may be distributed unevenly, depending on the resources and missions of partners in such arrangements

The NLA has led national collaborative initiatives for published materials, for example, the PANDORA archive. The partnership that is building PANDORA is based on a formal exchange of letters under which each institution takes responsibility to varying degrees for selecting, archiving, cataloging, preserving, and providing access to Australian online publications, according to agreed-upon criteria and processes. PANDORA has operated since 1996, and the partnership has gradually extended to other organizations, including ScreenSound Australia, the state libraries, and one territory library. The State Library of Tasmania has developed its own procedures and policy for its institutional initiative, Our Digital Island, which is archiving online publications and works closely with the NLA toward joint goals. It is strongly considering using the PANDORA Digital Archiving System with the option of storing files on its own server. The diversity of their approaches has enabled the NLA and the State Library of Tasmania to share lessons learned and to coordinate initiatives, such as developing a scheme for a national persistent identifier. Some areas of the national online collection remain to be covered; among these are the evolving preprint archives.

Incentives for participation in national initiatives vary from sector to sector. For publishers, deposit with the NLA means being included in the national bibliography, greater exposure for their publications, and ongoing access to their publications without the cost of maintaining them. The NLA agrees to restrict access to commercial material so that commercial interests are not threatened by deposit.

For other libraries or institutions, collaboration may secure the following:

• access to shared infrastructure or policy that would be expensive to procure individually, for example, PANDORA selection guidelines;
• Stronger advocacy, for example, NLA and ScreenSound Australia's joint representation on legal deposit; and
• Access to and sharing of expertise and project learning internationally, for example, involvement in RLG/OCLC working groups.

For all entities participating in national initiatives led by the NLA, a degree of empathy is implicit for securing the cultural heritage of Australia and therefore for supporting the mission of the NLA in achieving this.

National initiatives include the following projects:

PANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia)

The NLA and its partners collaboratively maintain PANDORA, the national collection of Australian online publications. PANDORA is internationally recognized as a key initiative in the selective archiving of online materials. The collaboration has extended to include all State libraries and one Territory library, as well as Screensound Australia. Material for inclusion in PANDORA is selected either by the NLA or its partners. There is central storage of material at NLA. The NLA has developed archiving software for distributed selection, gathering, and deposit. Version 2 of this software will allow distributed storage and will accommodate the specific local development within Tasmania.

Code of Practice for Providing Long-term Access to Australian Online Publications

The NLA has developed this draft in consultation with the Australian Publishers Association to cover archiving and preservation of, and access to, commercial publications produced in Australia. Given the small size of the Australian commercial publishing industry, the code will not have extensive application outside of Australia for some time. However, it has been invaluable in developing awareness among the commercial publishers and in preparing the ground for discussion of legal deposit of electronic materials.

Australian Digital Resource Identifier

The NLA is developing a national persistent identification scheme for electronic information resources in collaboration with the State Library of Tasmania and on behalf of CASL. The scheme, to be known as the Australian Digital Resource Identifier (ADRI), will provide a guide for organizations to name their resources in a way that will ensure continued access to the resources in the future. CASL endorsed in principle a draft schema for ADRI in November 2001.

Other Australian projects and initiatives include the following:

Our Digital Island (Tasmanian State Library)

The TSL has developed this selective Web archiving initiative for online publications in the State of Tasmania.

Higher Education Sector

There has been relatively little digital preservation work in the Australian higher education sector, although a major conference, "Digital Continuity," was convened in November 2001 to consider the state of the art and how Australian universities should engage with the issues. There is a national digital theses program with distributed archiving by institutions and a central interface for access. Two university libraries are establishing e-print archives.

Sound Archives

Australia has an active sound archiving community that for years has been using digital formats for archiving.

The NLA and ScreenSound Australia have instituted many evaluation and life testing trials on CD-R and digital audio tapes. The expanding capabilities of mass-storage systems now make them viable for the storage and preservation of large amounts of audio data. The NLA is migrating its audio holdings from CD-R to mass storage.

The radio network of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has implemented a computer-based digital on-air system. Consequently, they do not generate analog copies of new material and now archive on CD-R.

Picture Australia and Music Australia

There are several significant and innovative national resource discovery initiatives to access outcomes from digitization projects involving the NLA and other partners. These include Picture Australia and Music Australia.

3.1.4 International Initiatives

The NLA believes that international collaboration at many levels is essential in digital preservation; to this end, it wants to work with the U.S. Library of Congress and other international agencies.

Current collaborative international activities include the following:

Preserving Access to Digital Information

Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) is a digital preservation gateway maintained by NLA and individual and institutional partners in Australia and abroad. It started as a voluntary initiative among a number of Australian organizations; later, a single institution was created to give the program the resources it needed to develop fully. The NLA has led in development of PADI and provides staff and systems support. In 2001, PADI's functionality was extended to allow registered individuals outside the NLA to enter information directly into the PADI database.

PADI has an international advisory group, and the NLA has sought to develop collaboration in maintaining PADI internationally. Individuals have been able to register as contributors and input directly since 2001. More recently, the NLA and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC; see section 3.4.3) have agreed to a memorandum of understanding on collaborative activity. This will include DPC input to PADI and a series of links and joint activity. This arrangement could be mirrored in future with other organizations worldwide.

Safekeeping Initiative

The Safekeeping Initiative was established with seed funding from CLIR. It aims to identify key digital preservation resources recorded in PADI and to secure agreements for their long-term preservation. The NLA is evaluating this initiative.

Conference of Directors of National Libraries

The director-general of NLA is chair of the Conference of Directors of National Libraries (CDNL). CDNL has set up a digital issues group, which has an action plan that concentrates on legal deposit, persistent identification and digital archiving, and preservation research needs. This group was instrumental in submitting a digital preservation resolution to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The KB chairs the digital issues group.

International Research Projects

The NLA staff contributes to the OCLC/RLG Working Group on Preservation Metadata and the RLG/OCLC Working Group on Digital Archive Attributes. Through review comments, the NLA has contributed significantly to the OAIS reference model, NEDLIB, and other international projects in digital preservation, including the development of Preservation Management of Digital Materials: A Handbook (Jones and Beagrie 2001).

3.1.5 Future International Collaboration

The following were seen as potentially important areas for future international collaboration by NLA:

• working on persistent identifiers
• exploring how national collections can be linked
• developing a global or distributed software archive
• documenting and sharing information on preservation dependencies in publications
• implementing a technology watch for file and media formats
• sharing and discussing research and evaluations of specific implementations
• implementing preservation metadata with international publishers
• developing archive certification models arising out of the RLG/OCLC Working Group on Digital Archive Attributes
• establishing fail-safe mechanisms globally for collections (it was recognized this is more difficult and sensitive than some of the previous suggestions and might be a lower or long-term priority)

While it is often easy to agree on international collaboration, real progress is difficult unless resources are dedicated to the work. There needs to be rigorous discussion of what is useful for both parties and what resources must be committed.

3.2 France

3.2.1 National Context

Passed in 1992 and implemented in 1993, France's national legal deposit legislation covers publications of all types produced or distributed in that country. The legislation does not specifically mention electronic publications, but the act has been applied to offline electronic publications such as CD-ROMs that have been produced in France. Under the legislation, responsibilities are divided among the following institutions:

• The Bibliothèque nationale de France is responsible for all published documents, videos, and multimedia works.
• The Centre National de la Cinématographie is responsible for film.
• The Institut National de l'Audiovisuel is responsible for radio and television broadcasts.

There is regional deposit for printed material in 19 regional libraries. However, there is no regional deposit for electronic publications. Two copies of electronic publications that exist in physical formats, such as CD-ROM, must be deposited with BnF.

It is estimated that there are more than 300,000 Web sites in France, excluding hosted sites. In July 2000, a recommendation was made to extend the legal deposit legislation to cover electronic materials on the Web. A legal process is now under way to achieve this. When the law is enacted, producers based in France will be obligated to deposit their Web sites. Producers can meet this obligation by depositing materials directly by ftp or on a physical carrier, or by arranging for the library to harvest the site. The law will not specify whether Web archiving is to be selective or exhaustive, and selection decisions will be at the discretion of the library. Much discussion is expected with producers over implementation of any new law. Any new legislation is unlikely to be declared before 2003Ð2004.

All librarians in French research libraries, which include the university libraries and the national library, are civil servants employed by the Ministry of Education. For this reason, there is a regular movement of staff between the national library and the provinces. There is a single national school for training librarians.

There is substantial government investment in scientific research, and the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA) is one of the three centers for the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C).

The French archives law sets out rules for managing public archives and for protecting private archives. The law applies to all local and national public organizations. Although French archives are under central direction through the Archives of France (a directorate of the French Ministry of Culture), they are highly decentralized; the National Archives, for example, consists of five separate centers.

There is growing interest in long-term preservation of digital information across many sectors in France. This is reflected in a number of international conferences arranged there on the topic in the last year.

3.2.2 The French National Library (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) is funded through the French Ministry of Culture and has a staff of 2,800. It has an annual budget of 1 billion French francs for operating costs. This sum excludes salaries, which are controlled by and paid for separately by the Ministry of Education (the librarians) or the Ministry of Culture (other staff). Six hundred staff members are on short-term contracts funded from the operating costs. The library does not lend materials or supply documents. It is solely a library of last resort with on-site access to any material in copyright that has been deposited.

Digitization of collections started in 1992 and includes materials in the national library and in associated library collections. There has been a strong focus on digitizing public-domain print collections, and they are made available through the Gallica Web site. The digitized collection consists of homogenous documented formats and has already been migrated once. A large program for digitizing video has just started.

Digital Systems

The library has 100 Unix servers, 150 NT servers, and 3,000 workstations. There is a 150-MB ATM network internally and a 150-MB connection externally through the research network in Paris. There is distributed computing power and 24/7 service capability across the library; however, a central archival store is considered a necessary future development. The current main approach to long-term preservation is to develop a preservation metadata database to inform migration and preservation decisions across these distributed storage systems.

Funding

Digital preservation initiatives are funded through the operational budget. Funds are reallocated to support experimentation with Web archiving. However, additional funding is being sought to continue this work in 2003.

Digital Preservation Policy and Actions

There is a separate workflow for electronic legal deposit publications within BnF. The audiovisual department takes all electronic deposit materials because it already has equipment for accessing recorded CDs and digital tapes. Of the two deposit copies, one is retained within the audiovisual department and the other is sent to a BnF conservation building outside Paris.

The library has just formed a working group to develop digital preservation across all its departments. It includes representatives from the Digital Library Project team and the library's audiovisual, IT, conservation, and collections departments. The working group will gather information on the scale of work needed across the library, what is being done, and what is being considered. It will adopt the OAIS model and apply it within BnF. Julien Masanès is the group's coordinator and serves as project leader for evaluating Web site archiving.

In December 2000, BnF launched a set of experiments on archiving the national Web domain. No access is given to materials in this experimental Web archive. Future public access on-site at the BnF will depend on arrangements in any revised legal deposit legislation. The goal of these experiments is to evaluate costs and to define procedures for selection, transfer, and preservation that can be applied for any new legal deposit law extension to online materials.

The library is working with INRIA to test their XYLEME software as a tool for Web archiving. The project leader is working with collections staff to see whether the automated weighting this software provides can be used to help in the selection of Web sites for archiving.

3.2.3 National and Institutional Initiatives

The division of responsibility for legal deposit is set out in legislation. The load is divided according to the type of material, as noted above. A scientific committee oversees implementation of the legislation.

The Ministry of Culture has funded coordinated research on technology, including research on producing archival-quality CDs.

The Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) has led the development of the OAIS reference model standard in France and has coordinated development of an informal group, Pérennisation des Informations Numériques (PIN), that is working on this and other standards and guidelines.

Pérennisation des Informations Numériques

• Archives de France
• Archive-17
• Bibliothèque nationale de France
• Centre des Archives Contemporaines, one of the five centers within the National Archives
• CNES
• Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique
• Groupe Mederic
• INA
• Institut Pasteur

Public Records

The Archives of France is developing guidelines for electronic archives. The Archives of France control the National Archives and the regional, departmental, and municipal archive agencies, as well as the archive agencies of organizations that are authorized, by way of derogation, to manage their permanent archives.

The Archives of France is exploring the possibility of cooperating with BnF on archiving government Web sites. Such collaboration would have significant technical benefits, because French archives are decentralized and central IT support is limited. It is anticipated that the Archives will want to process Web sites differently than the BnF does, given archival interests in the hierarchy and administrative context of the documents.

The Institut National de l'Audiovisuel

The INA is responsible for France's cultural audiovisual heritage. Under legal deposit legislation, INA is responsible for deposits from the country's six national television channels (public and commercial) and five public radio channels. Under the French communications law, INA is also responsible for maintaining the archive for public radio and television.

INA is one of the three major partners in the PRESTO project, described in section 4.4. It is making heavy use of digitization for preservation and also taking more material in born-digital form.

INA wants to extend its mission to the French Web and is developing a harvester with the École Nationale Supérieure.

Academic Sector

The university libraries are starting a scheme for submitting university theses in electronic formats. The scheme provides style sheets in Word and reformats submissions into XML. The project is based at Lyon University and is just beginning to consider long-term preservation. The institutions will archive the theses and will not deposit them with the BnF.

The Consortium Universitaire des Périodiques Numériques (COUPERIN), the main purchasing consortium for university libraries, is concerned about the archiving of and future access to the journals to which it subscribes. COUPERIN is reluctant to rely solely on publishers for these long-term arrangements. It has begun discussing with the BnF arrangements under which BnF would archive electronic journals that fall outside of legal deposit. BnF would wish to seek payment for this; however, because the costs of digital preservation are uncertain, BnF cannot now make contractual commitments to third parties.

3.2.4 International Initiatives

Networked European Deposit Library

The BnF was a partner in the NEDLIB project, described in section 4.2, and led work on defining preservation metadata. Catherine Lupovici and Julien Masanès coauthored the NEDLIB metadata report (2000).

Open Archival Information System

CNES has had a major involvement in the OAIS standard, described in section 4.3. It is currently leading work within the Archiving Group on Ingest Methodologies.

PRESTO

INA is one of the three lead partners in the PRESTO project, described in section 4.4.

3.2.5 Future International Initiatives

The BnF is keen to take part in international activities, but time pressures make it hard to participate on any scale or to follow everything that is happening or that has been disseminated through e-mail lists or digital preservation gateways. They highlighted the following as areas of priority for future international collaboration:

• The library would like to see joint research in technical areas such as harvesting the Web or reformatting databases behind database-driven Web sites into XML. They believe this area would also be of interest to the Library of Congress.
• The NEDLIB project was highly regarded by the BnF, and the library would like to see some practical extension of this activity among national libraries.

3.3 The Netherlands

3.3.1 National Context

There is no legal deposit legislation in the Netherlands for either print or electronic publications. Consequently, the KB has worked in this area on its own initiative and as a natural extension of its mission to safeguard the nation's published heritage.

The KB has developed voluntary agreements on deposit of electronic publications with publishers. It first formed bilateral agreements with Elsevier and Kluwer, which dominate Dutch publishing and provide most of the electronic journal titles accessioned by the KB. In June 1999, the library signed a general agreement with the Dutch Publishers Association.

Voluntary agreements have limitations in that publishers do not always have rights in third-party materials. Only statutory provisions could resolve these difficulties. For this reason, The KB still wishes to see a statutory right to archive publications, perhaps through the national implementation of exceptions in the European Union (EU) Copyright Directive.

The Dutch government aims to carry out 25 percent of its transactions with citizens digitally by 2002. There is thus significant investment in a program to develop strategies, methods, techniques, and tools to support e-government and information society initiatives. Concerns about business continuity and electronic records led to the establishment of a Digital Longevity Program as part of these initiatives. There are five projects within this program, including a digital preservation research testbed and a task force to support awareness raising and communication across government agencies.

Activity in the academic sector has focused on establishing e-print and digital archives concerned with access and new models for electronic publishing.

A national plan for preservation, the Delta Plan, has operated since 1991 and has assessed the preservation needs of print and manuscript materials. In 1997, a national program for the preservation of library materials, Metamorfoze, was launched. This is coordinated by the National Preservation Office (NPO) of the Netherlands, which also provide grants to support preservation. The NPO is organized by and housed in the KB. The program focuses on reformatting paper to microfilm, deacidification, and some assessment of digitization as a preservation surrogate.

All publications deposited with the KB are cataloged into the national bibliography. The cataloging is done using a joint system operated by the KB and all the research libraries in the Netherlands. Pica and OCLC technically maintain the joint cataloging system. From the resulting bibliographic database, a national union catalog is produced.

3.3.2 The National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek)

The KB has a staff of 350 (about 260 full-time equivalents) and is funded through the science section of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. Its budget in 2002 was 80.4 million guilders (36.5 million euros).

The KB collects the published and literary heritage of the Netherlands. Its collections comprise mainly book and serial publications. This can include multimedia publications, but at present it does not collect any audiovisual, film, or broadcast materials or software, games, or databases. (The KB may collect databases in the future.) The KB is also interested in the future selective archiving of parts of the Dutch Internet domain.

KB initiatives include developing the Digital Archive Store Project (DNEP), a national agreement on voluntary deposit with publishers, a long-term digital preservation study with IBM, and many digitization projects, including the Memory of the Netherlands and Treasures of the National Library. The latter two projects focus on improving access and interoperability with other collections.

Development of Digital Systems

There has been investment in developing access systems and particularly in Web access to the catalogs.

The new deposit system for electronic publications has developed in a number of distinct phases. The KB was the lead partner in the EU-funded NEDLIB project and helped develop its guidelines for electronic deposit systems. These guidelines propose creation of a controlled environment for storing and maintaining electronic publications (the deposit system) and developing transfer procedures for electronic publications to the deposit system. NEDLIB also employed Jeff Rothenberg of the RAND Corporation to investigate the feasibility of emulation as a long-term solution for digital preservation.

In 1999, the KB investigated the feasibility of obtaining an operational deposit system for its electronic publications from commercial information technology suppliers. The KB concluded that the storage and management functions could be obtained from existing vendors. However, for long-term preservation and access, it was clear that no off-the-shelf solutions were available and that KB would need to commission specific research to develop the required functionality.

In September 2000, the KB contracted with IBM-Netherlands to build the new deposit system. The Deposit of Netherlands Electronic Publications-implementation (DNEP-i) contract also includes applied research from IBM to develop new functionality for long-term preservation and access (work referred to as the "LTP study"). A major requirement of the KB was that the system should be compliant with the OAIS standard. The KB required the design of the system to be linked with the LTP study. IBM is developing the data model so that in the near future an operational LTP module can be fitted into to the system.

At the end of 2001, the first module for delivery and capture was made available. The system will be completed in October 2002.

The DNEP-i project aims to yield an OAIS-compliant operational deposit system and to test and demonstrate requirements for the future development of a long-term preservation module, which will need to be added to the deposit system.

This long-term preservation module will be needed to

• identify digital objects in danger of becoming inaccessible because of technology changes;
• implement preservation strategies to address these dangers, such as migration and emulation; and
• supply the technical metadata needed to generate and validate the required viewing environments for digital objects during delivery.

Preservation Actions

The LTP study will involve six months of work over a one-year period and will cost 300,000 guilders (136,134 euros). Its objective is to investigate the functionality required for the long-term (that is, hundreds of years) preservation of the digital information stored in the DNEP. The study began in November 2000, with the start of the DNEP-i project. It aims to cover the following issues:

• Implementation of Long-term Preservation. The initial DNEP system has a limited functionality for maintaining the technical data (hardware and software components) needed to render the stored digital objects. One of the main responsibilities of the LTP study is to define the functional requirements of the preservation subsystem not considered in the initial DNEP release. In the end, the preservation subsystem should maintain all the technical metadata needed to render the digital objects.
• Universal Virtual Computer Proof of Concept. The preservation approach advocated by Raymond Lorie at the IBM Almaden Research Center, based on the use of a Universal Virtual Computer, is being refined and validated in the context of the KB.
• Large Media Migration. Electronic deposit applications face specific problems while migrating information from one medium to another because of the high volume of data involved. The impact of these volume-specific requirements on the DNEP system has to be assessed.
• Authenticity. A workable framework to define authenticity of digital objects is needed to evaluate the success of the preservation activities of any electronic deposit.

The KBM and IBM are jointly producing five LTP study reports (one report on the four issues just described and a general synthesis).

In addition to the work just described, the KB has engaged in the following initiatives:

• The KB is participating as a test site in the final year extension of the Cedars Project (see section 3.3.4).
• The KB undertook an experiment with the NEDLIB Web harvester to investigate the Dutch Web domain. It found that only 20 percent of sites were of interest to the KB and that a significant number of these were database driven.
• The KB has undertaken research on workflows for electronic journals that are being implemented in the new system. It is also developing a new workflow for CD-ROMs that will be integrated into the new deposit system.

Funding

The KB has a national role in the public interest and therefore supports its activities with government funding. The KB believes its public service role is paramount and does not wish to adopt a commercial model. Fees for services are set only to recover costs.

Between 1998 and 2001, the KB received 3.2 million guilders (1.45 million euros) plus some research funding to prepare for the development of the new deposit system. Beginning in 2003, annual funding of 2.5 million guilders (1.14 million euros) will be available to support this activity.

The KB currently holds the Dutch imprint of the Elsevier group under a voluntary deposit arrangement, and it has been archiving a subset of Elsevier's electronic journals for some years. It has agreed to archive a copy of all Elsevier's electronic titles. This extension of the KB's activities might need additional funding, depending on the range and nature of the services to be delivered. Economic models to support this work are under investigation. The KB would not wish to charge users other than for cost recovery of specific services. The KB is interested in funding models where such services are free to the user but paid for by the producer, who recovers the cost in product pricing. Examples of the application of this funding model in other areas include the models developed to support use of the digital object identifier (DOI) in publishing, or barcodes in retailing.

Most collaborative initiatives are not funded and must rely on matching contributions in staff time and other resources from the partners.

3.3.3 National and Institutional Initiatives

Digital Longevity (Digitale Duurzaamheid)

There are five projects within the government's Digital Longevity Program, including a digital preservation research testbed (described in the next section) and a task force to support awareness raising and communication across government agencies. Other projects concern central government databases, record-keeping systems, and quality of records. The program is run by ICTU, an agency established to oversee the e-government program.

The KB is a member of the task force for the Digital Longevity Program. As part of the program, the National Archives has been discussing renting part of the storage space on the KB platform to provide interim storage for electronic records transferred from government departments.

Digital Preservation Testbed (Testbed Digitale Bewaring)

The Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (the National Archives) established a three-year digital preservation testbed as part of the Digital Longevity Program. The project began in October 2000 and will conclude in September 2003. The testbed was preceded by a research study by Rothenberg and Bikson (1999). The digital preservation testbed is carrying out experiments according to defined research questions. It is researching three approaches to long-term digital preservation: migration, emulation, and XML. It is experimenting with text documents, spreadsheets, e-mail messages, and databases of different size, format, complexity, and nature. The effectiveness of each approach for different material is being evaluated, as are their limitations, costs, and application potential.

The following outcomes are expected:

• advice on approaches for current digital records in government departments
• recommendations for the best preservation approaches for specific circumstances
• functional system requirements for preservation
• cost models for different preservation approaches
• preservation approach decision trees
• recommendations for new legislation

The project has so far produced a research base. A list of relevant projects and a white paper on migration are available online.

The project is collaborating with the Public Record Office (PRO) in the U.K. and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in the United States, and has informal links to ERPANET and Interpares through staff at the Dutch National Archives.

Public Records

Dutch archives are funded through the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. Historically, there have been a federal government archive and 12 state archives with some local archives for specific municipalities or polders. The national structure is being reorganized to create a federal government archive with a national archive service of regional archive centers. The 1995 archives legislation covers electronic public records and requires that they be transferred to the archive after 20 years. Regulations introduced in 2000 specify the formats and metadata in and with which the records must be presented.

Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services

The Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services (NIWI) is an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. It curates and provides access to primary research data and research information in biomedicine, social sciences, history, and Dutch language and literature. In addition, it supplies information about research and researchers in the Netherlands in all scientific fields. Its current projects include one pilot effort in digital preservation. Titled Archiving Digital Academic Heritage, the project is exploring the feasibility of setting up digital archiving services for scientific or scholarly research material in the Dutch academic sector. In the pilot, the research data files of the Meertens Institute are being archived. Marketing research will be undertaken to establish the level of demand for archiving services in the academic sector.

Roquade

Three Dutch university libraries were partners in the Roquade project: Utrecht University Library, Delft University of Technology Library, and the NIWI. The project researched development of electronic archives to enhance scientific communication in the academic sector. The project estimated the cost of metadata assignment, administration and quality control, and technical infrastructure for an electronic archive accepting 5,000 items per year to be 29 euros per item.

Academic Research in the Netherlands Online

Academic Research in the Netherlands Online (ARNO) is developing university document servers to make available the scientific output of participating universities. Project participants are the University of Amsterdam, Tilburg University, and the University of Twente. The project is building on earlier Dutch electronic publishing projects and the Open Archives Initiative.

3.3.4 International Initiatives

NEDLIB

The KB chaired the NEDLIB project between 1998 and 2000. Funded by the EU, NEDLIB was a collaborative project of national libraries and other partners researching the infrastructure upon which a networked European deposit library could be built. (NEDLIB is described in greater detail in section 4.2.)

Conference of European National Librarians

The KB participates in the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) and occupies the CENL chair. CENL is an independent association of the chief executives of the national libraries in member states of the Council of Europe.

COBRA+ Forum

The KB also participates in the COBRA+ Forum. COBRA+ is a standing committee of CENL. It was the key forum for developing proposals for European projects such as NEDLIB and The European Library (TEL).

KB/BL Memorandum of Understanding

The KB has had a memorandum of understanding since 1995 with the British Library covering collaboration on digitization. In December 2000, this agreement was updated to include collaboration on digital preservation. The BL has observer status on the KB/IBM LTP study, and there is joint review of documents as both groups develop their deposit systems.

Cedars Project

The KB is a test site in the final year of the Cedars Project (described in section 3.4.3). It is using the Cedars namespace to look at allocating and cross-referencing persistent identifiers in a demonstrator project. The KB had previously participated in Cedars Project discussions about defining the significant properties of publications.

Conference of Directors of National Libraries

The Conference of Directors of National Libraries (CDNL) has set up a group on digital issues that is chaired by the KB (the KB is simultaneously vice-chair of CDNL). The group has an action plan that concentrates on deposit agreements, persistent identifiers, and digital preservation research needs. It was instrumental in getting the UNESCO General Conference to adopt a digital preservation resolution. The Dutch national government submitted this UNESCO resolution and the KB helped formulate the text.

International Research Projects

KB staff members contribute to the OCLC/RLG Working Group on Preservation Metadata. The KB has provided significant input to the OAIS reference model. KB staff members also regularly present papers at relevant international conferences.

3.3.5 Future International Initiatives

The KB sees the following as potentially important areas for future international collaboration:

• For long-term preservation activities, it will be necessary to develop registries of file formats, migration tools and emulators, and technology libraries with obsolete software and its documentation. Although libraries could develop such registries individually, there are obvious cost benefits in collaboration. Such services could easily be networked and shared internationally.
• More research is needed on long-term preservation.
• National libraries are developing new workflows and skills to handle digital materials. Experience and emerging practices should be shared internationally.
• There should be more discussion and collaboration internationally on materials selection and on responsibility for long-term preservation. National libraries will always have a responsibility for their own cultural heritage; however, electronic publishing and businesses are increasingly global rather than national in scope, and national imprints are less easy to define. Alongside the national collections, we may see the development of archives for international publishers. How these international collections can be funded and fitted within national frameworks and institutions remains to be defined. If funding were available, some national libraries might take a wider international role.
• The KB has undertaken some pilot activity in Web archiving but recognizes that some other national libraries now have substantial experience in this field. It believes Web archiving is an area with substantial scope for collaboration and sharing of experience and tools among the national libraries.
• The KB perceives that there is little real research on digital preservation in memory institutions. This is partly because of reliance on external funding. Funding bodies are focusing on relatively low-risk activity, such as workshops and reports. To counteract this, they suggest that institutions themselves pool some funding from their operational budgets and earmark it for digital preservation technologies research. Such research need not be expensive if the cost is shared.

3.4 United Kingdom

3.4.1 National Context

There is a network of copyright deposit libraries in the United Kingdom consisting of the British Library, the National Library of Wales, the National Library of Scotland, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, Cambridge University Library, and Trinity College Library Dublin. A Standing Committee of Legal Deposit Libraries provides a forum for joint discussion and activities.

There is no legal deposit legislation for electronic materials, although forthcoming legislation is anticipated. The British Library has a Joint Committee on Voluntary Deposit, which is a forum for discussion with publishers and the other U.K. copyright libraries on progress with voluntary deposit of electronic publications and future legislation. Some degree of distributed archiving is likely to be adopted, although most will probably be at the British Library.

The government is leading a move toward devolving powers to the regions, and few institutions have an absolute or U.K.-wide remit.

There are very large and long-established publishing and music industries in the United Kingdom, and this is reflected in the size of the BL's and other libraries' holdings and collections. Many commercial and noncommercial publishers based in the U.K. are producing digital works. They include international publishers of all sizes. The national mapping agency is now entirely based on digital surveys and deposits snapshots of its national topographical database (a geographic information system) with the BL.

The U.K. government has a significant drive toward electronic delivery of all local and central government services as set out in "Modernising Government," the U.K. government's agenda for modernizing public services. The target date is 2004. This effort will have a significant impact on Web delivery and electronic record keeping. This development is reinforced by progressive implementation across all public sectors of the Freedom of Information Act.

The United Kingdom has a diverse range of cultural institutions with digital preservation initiatives arising from their institutional missions, many of which extend beyond the institution concerned. These initiatives have had a high profile internationally.

The Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher and Further Education Councils (JISC) provides significant centralized digital research and development funding and coordination for the higher education and further education sectors in the United Kingdom. The digital focus of JISC and its central funding and direction mean that the U.K. higher education sector has played a major part nationally and internationally in digital preservation initiatives.

Across all sectors, memory institutions face significant funding constraints and have static or declining core budgets in real terms. They are required to balance the demands of traditional and electronic materials, and demands in both areas continue to grow.

Across the United Kingdom (perhaps with the exception of the data centers provided for primary research data), digital preservation efforts have focused on pilot projects, research, and guideline development. Although much has been achieved, there is a growing desire to move from projects to services. This is difficult to achieve when new funding is often of relatively short duration and project oriented.

The limited funding available to institutions individually and the scale of challenges involved have prompted partnerships and collaboration among institutions and serious discussion of whether responsibilities can be identified and shared. Discussions are at an early stage, and arrangements are likely to take some time to evolve.

Although there is now a reasonable degree of awareness of digital preservation among curators and academic sectors in the United Kingdom, awareness among the general public and among key stakeholders, including senior civil servants, Members of Parliament, funding bodies, and publishers, is very low. This is a major impediment to increasing funding for digital preservation activities and in engaging with major stakeholders.

3.4.2 The British Library

With a staff of 2,400, the BL is a nondepartmental government body funded through the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport. Its budget in 2000Ð2001 was £110.26 million, of which £82.27 million was government grants in aid. The remaining £28 million came principally from document supply services.

The BL is the national library of the United Kingdom and has major international collections. Its sound holdings include published music, drama and literature, international music, wildlife sounds, and oral history.

There have been a number of significant digitization projects for enhancing access to the collections made possible by project funding from organizations such as The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and New Opportunities Fund (a distributor of U.K. lottery funds). Within the next four years, it is anticipated there will be more than one million digitized images.

Development of Digital Systems

A procurement exercise for a long-term preservation facility, the Digital Library Store (DLS), was terminated shortly after submission of this survey to the Library of Congress. The BL is exploring alternative options.

Digital storage for large-scale items such as digital master (TIFF) images is currently provided through a contract with the University of London Computer Centre.

Funding

All activities have been funded from existing government funding; there has been no increase for digital preservation activities. As other demands are also increasing, this has meant cutting back in some areas to fund new developments.

Collaboration in digital preservation activities has been on the basis of joint in-kind contributions of staff time and resources. For the Digital Preservation Coalition, described in section 3.4.3, the BL also contributes £10,000 per year as a full member.

There have been bids to government from the six copyright libraries to develop a secure network among deposit libraries. This would allow shared access to a single deposit for electronic materials and scope for distributing the archiving responsibility. So far, these bids have not been successful. The libraries are proceeding with a small demonstration project with project funding contributed jointly.

The BL has made a bid to the government for £600,000 annually starting in 2004 to begin selective Web site archiving combined with regular snapshots of the U.K. Web domain.

Digital Preservation Policy and Actions

The BL has issued "Strategic Directions," a future strategy for the BL that emphasizes development of electronic collections, digital preservation, and partnerships with other organizations. It suggests that collection policy will increasingly focus on the United Kingdom's published and literary heritage, and that there will be more focused acquisition of overseas publications. A public consultation on the proposed strategy is being undertaken and responses are being evaluated. There is a digital preservation policy used as a working document internally.

It is intended that legal deposit of electronic publications will cover all physical format and online publications in the United Kingdom, possibly with special arrangements for commercial databases. The Domain U.K. project has harvested 100 U.K. Web sites for a selected range of subject areas with permission from rights holders, and this experience is helping shape future selection guidelines.

Voluntary deposit of electronic publications was introduced in January 2000. It has been concentrated on physical formats published in the United Kingdom, but some publishers have also chosen to deposit online materials. Since January 2001, 3,000 electronic publication titles have been received under voluntary deposit from publishers. The voluntary deposit was initially focused on the British Library but may extend to other copyright libraries in due course. It is anticipated that only one copy would be deposited and access would be shared over a secure network.

Significant issues that have emerged from operation of the voluntary deposit scheme include the treatment of very high-value commercial databases and the metadata that can be supplied by publishers (particularly small and medium-size publishers) to accompany the deposit.

To address the metadata issue, the BL is partially funding development of a software package to help generate metadata to the ONIX standard being developed by publishers. The purposes of the Simple ONIX Editor (SIMONE) are

• to train ONIX users, especially those involved in ONIX record entry and record maintenance; and
• to enable small ONIX users to enter, maintain, and export records (for delivery as ONIX messages).

A "small ONIX user" is expected to be a publisher needing to create fewer than 100 records per year and to maintain fewer than 1,000 records, including front and back product lists.

By contributing to the development of the SIMONE software, which encourages the use of a common standard, the BL hopes to create future efficiencies and simplify the data input to its digital library systems.

In 2001, the BL appointed a digital preservation coordinator based in the Preservation Department to coordinate activities across the library and with external agencies and to provide a focus for advice and guidance to staff.

A range of pilot digital preservation projects, such as the voluntary deposit of electronic materials with publishers (to test procedures and policy before any legal deposit provisions), the Web site archiving pilot (Domain U.K.), and e-manuscripts and e-correspondence, are under way. The BL has also undertaken earlier pilot activities such as the CD-ROM demonstrator, which explored ingest procedures and costs for CD-ROM accessions.

The library contains the National Sound Archive, which has a longstanding voluntary deposit scheme with the music industry. The Sound Archive has undertaken research on the archival quality of CDs and will gradually move from offline CD storage toward mass storage as the DLS is completed.

Staff training has been a significant issue within the BL. The library has organized a number of "e-fairs" to demonstrate current projects to all staff and has sponsored lectures, seminars, and "learning circles" across departments.

The library has been used as a testbed for several research projects including Cedars, the Preservation Management of Digital Materials Handbook, and Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS).

The library is a founding member of the DPC, and its chief executive is the coalition's current chair.

3.4.3 National and Institutional Initiatives

The Digital Preservation Coalition

Establishing a DPC was the primary recommendation of a U.K. digital preservation workshop convened at Warwick in 1999. The coalition was established in July 2001 with the aim of pursuing a U.K. digital preservation agenda in an international context. The DPC is a membership organization and has a structure of full members, associate members, and allied organizations. In the eight months following the launch of the DPC, its membership grew to 19 organizations. It is cross-sectoral and includes all the significant institutions in the U.K. library and archive sectors as well as publisher organizations, research institutes, government agencies, and service providers.

Initial support for the DPC came from JISC through part-time involvement of a JISC-funded program director and funds from membership contributions. The coalition is a limited company. It has been a grassroots development with limited initial funding. Its first focus was advocacy, including a successful campaign to raise public awareness of digital preservation through the national press and a launch at the House of Commons. It held two members' forums in its first eight months of existence, the first on digital curation (particularly the OAIS standard and the U.K. e-science program) and the second on Web archiving. Information on the coalition is disseminated through its Web pages (www.dpconline.org) and the digital-preservation list on the JISC mail listserv (www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/digital-preservation.html).

The DPC has the following long-term goals:

• producing, providing, and disseminating information on current research and practice and building expertise among its members to accelerate their learning and to widen the pool of professionals skilled in digital preservation;
• instituting a concerted and coordinated effort to get digital preservation on the agenda of stakeholders in terms that they will understand and find persuasive;
• acting in concert to make arguments for appropriate and adequate funding to secure the nation's investment in digital resources and ensure an enduring global digital memory;
• providing a common forum for the development and coordination of digital preservation strategies in the United Kingdom and placing them within an international context;
• promoting and developing services, technology, and standards for digital preservation;
• forging strategic alliances with relevant agencies nationally and internationally and working together and with industry and research organizations to address shared challenges in digital preservation; and
• attracting funding to support achievement of DPC goals and programs.

The coalition adopted its focus on the assumption that the initiative would require much time in building relationships and membership and realistically should therefore be confined to the United Kingdom. At the same time, the founding members recognized the global nature of the challenges and the need to be linked to and foster international activity. The DPC has already focused on this international context by being involved with OAIS standard workshops and by developing a collaboration agreement with the NLA. It has a number of international members with U.K. interests.

Public Records

In the U.K., public records are those of central government rather than of local government, which are covered by separate legislation. The Public Records Act is seen as covering electronic records, although it is likely that further legislation will be required. The Public Record Office has an electronic records program and is providing guidance and toolkits for government departments. It is procuring a new storage system as part of its e-preservation strategy and developing new initiatives to support the strategy. Large-scale government data sets are being preserved through a seven-year service contract with the University of London Computer Centre. Responsibility for public records in Northern Ireland and Scotland lies with the PROs of Northern Ireland and National Archives of Scotland, respectively.

Joint Information Systems Committee Digital Preservation Focus

The JISC of the Higher and Further Education Councils is an institution unique to the United Kingdom. It is supported through public funding distributed through the councils to universities and colleges. It has been involved significantly in digital preservation initiatives. In June 2000, it established the JISC Digital Preservation Focus to provide further coordination to these initiatives, to develop strategy and guidelines, and to establish the DPC.

The initial three-year program of activities is drawing to a close, and the JISC Interim Preservation Strategy will soon be revised. The JISC is developing a new program that will include further digital research initiatives and new programs and services for digital preservation in the higher education and further education sector. A major area of concern is scholarly publishing and archiving arrangements for the large number of e-publications used in U.K. research and teaching that will fall outside any likely extension to U.K. legal deposit legislation. Other significant areas are likely to be institutional e-print archives and electronic records, project Web sites, structures to support digital preservation research, and e-science.

Primary Research Data

The United Kingdom has a Data Archive for the Social Sciences, established in the early 1970s, and a series of centers for data funded by the Natural Environmental Research Council. The national laboratories and the Sanger Centre also hold significant collections. Large-scale effort and funding are now being directed to developing e-science and a research grid in the United Kingdom. There are close links to similar developments in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. There are significant digital curation issues within the grid, and digital preservation is seen as an important issue for scientific data that will be generated over the next decade. Linkages with digital library and preservation research are being explored and could lead to a significant investment in collaborative research.

The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) has been developed to provide data and preservation services in the arts and humanities. Established in 1996 by JISC as a three-year project to collect and preserve primary digital materials for research in the arts and humanities in the U.K., the AHDS has become a jointly funded service between JISC and the Arts and Humanities Research Board. The service was established on a distributed model with a central executive provider and five subject-based service providers.

The AHDS has produced a number of highly regarded guides to good practice and has a distinctive digital collections policy. This formed the basis for a research study entitled "A Strategic Framework for Creating and Preserving Digital Collections" (Beagrie and Greenstein 1998). The AHDS is undertaking a digital preservation audit of its holdings and will use the findings to inform and revise its preservation guidance.

Cedars Project

Funded by JISC and undertaken by the Consortium of University Research Libraries, Cedars is examining the preservation of electronic publications. Initially funded for three years, it was extended by one year to fully document and disseminate its findings and to involve new institutions in its work. Five reports are being produced from the final year of the project. A national invitational workshop involving publishers and libraries was held in February 2002. Further information and documents are available on the Cedars Web site.

The project has provided important conceptual advances in preservation metadata and influential ideas on significant properties, representation networks, and distributed archiving. It has also raised awareness of digital preservation issues among research libraries and publishers in the United Kingdom.

Cedars concluded in March 2002. JISC is undertaking a consultancy on archiving e-publications for the U.K. higher and further education sector. It is seeking to develop and move forward outcomes from Cedars through the future programs of JISC and the DPC and to promote the outcomes in other archiving programs such as those at national libraries.

The National Preservation Office

The National Preservation Office (NPO) for the United Kingdom and Ireland is based in the British Library. It coordinated the development of a series of seven JISC/NPO digital preservation research studies and has published other studies in this field. It is an allied organization of the DPC, and the two organizations have a memorandum of understanding on their respective roles and joint activities.

Preservation Management of Digital Materials: A Handbook

The AHDS and JISC Digital Preservation Focus jointly developed Preservation of Digital Materials: A Handbook (Jones and Beagrie 2001). The research aimed to provide overviews of the key issues, decision trees, and checklists and to select significant research and exemplars worldwide. It was published by the British Library. A Web version has been made available and is maintained by the DPC. The handbook is linked to the PADI gateway through an agreement between the DPC and the NLA.

British Broadcasting Corporation Preservation Program

The BBC is one of the largest and oldest public broadcasters of television and radio programs in the world. It has a significant corporate archive. Responsibility for archiving this content rests with the BBC under its charter, but there is no separate funding stream for this. The BBC archive is a corporate archive and is used primarily to serve internal users. It is investing significantly in digital content both online and through digital delivery of programs. Although about 5 percent of television holdings are digital (less than 5 percent of radio holdings are digital), most new programming is now digital and digitization is seen as a key preservation method for analog holdings. There is a £60-million preservation program over 10 years for BBC television and radio archives. BBC Online is one of the most popular Web sites in Europe. A new media archivist has been appointed to develop records management and archiving of this and other digital content. The BBC is also one of the leading players in the PRESTO program.

3.4.4 International Initiatives

Most of the United Kingdom's digital preservation projects and initiatives involve international participation, often on a significant scale. The United Kingdom also has a major input into the development of international standards and working groups, including development of the ISO OAIS standard, Interpares, and the RLG/OCLC working groups on preservation metadata and on digital archive attributes.

Significant emphasis is placed, particularly within the U.K. higher education sector, on disseminating information and raising awareness about digital preservation through the Web and e-mail discussion lists, as well as through printed publications. There is therefore extensive international access to information on current digital preservation work in the United Kingdom or international work that the U.K. believes is significant.

The Humanities Advanced Technologies and Information Institute at the University of Glasgow is one of the four partners in the EU-funded ERPANET, which is described in section 4.1.

The DPC has a memorandum of understanding with the NLA and directly supports the PADI gateway through input of material from the United Kingdom.

There are also specifically international projects:

CAMiLEON

CAMiLEON is a three-year research project on digital preservation strategies jointly funded by JISC and U.S. National Science Foundation. It is based at the University of Leeds (technical research) and the University of Michigan (user evaluation). The project has looked at both emulation and migration as preservation strategies, using now-obsolete operating systems, programs, and data in its testing. Funding for the U.K. research will conclude in September 2002, and all U.K. deliverables are expected by December 2002. The technical approaches advocated for both migration-on-demand and emulation are of considerable interest and deserve wider discussion and testing.

KB and BL

A longstanding memorandum of understanding between the KB and the BL has recently been extended to cover digital preservation activities. There is collaboration on deposit systems implementation, and the BL is an observer on the KB long-term preservation research study.

European Sound Archives

A formal network of European national audiovisual archives is being established. There is a draft statement of intent on cooperation between them that is expected to be finalized and published after a meeting in Denmark late in 2002.

3.4.5 Future International Initiatives

The British Library sees the following initiatives as potentially important for future international collaboration:

• The BL is working closely with the KB and would welcome including the Library of Congress in future research on digital preservation. There is an opportunity to look at research on metadata and work with producers, particularly publishers, who are operating internationally.
• The European Library project is undertaking a feasibility study of shared access to digital collections in the European national libraries. This could also provide opportunities for collaboration on digital preservation.
• There is potential for the international development of services to support digital preservation in institutions. This could include software repositories and other tools.
• There is scope for greater international participation in and collaboration with the DPC, particularly as it develops services.
• A number of national libraries and other institutions internationally are now using the OAIS standard as a reference model for developing their digital archives. As initiatives evolve, there is an opportunity to share implementation experience and views on issues that arise. For example, the BL has recently had to consider whether records of items should never be deleted (as suggested in the OAIS standard) or whether deletion may be required in some exceptional cases.
• On digital preservation issues, the BL would like to see more research and involvement with computer science research departments both in the U.K. and internationally.
• The library believes that further international collaboration could occur on many levels, from pure "blue-sky" research to research and development with sister institutions on specific problems.

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