Digital preservation.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: Your editorial, "Government, Publishing and the Information Revolution" (June 2005), discussed, among other things, the issue of the disappearance of government information that is published on the Web. It also drew attention to efforts of libraries, such as the Library of Congress, the British Library and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, in the area of making collections of publications permanently available on the Web, and suggests that it would be good if the National Library of Australia could get similar projects under way.

There are two separate activities under discussion here: the collection of resources published on the Web ("born digital" resources), and the creation of digital images of traditional library collection material, such as pictures, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and books, which are made available on the Web. The National Library of Australia has had active programs in both of these areas for some time.

The National Library commenced archiving online publications and websites in 1996, well before any of the three big libraries mentioned in your editorial did. In fact, both the British Library and the Library of Congress looked to the model already established by PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive (http://pandora.nla.gov.au/ index.html) when they started to think about web archiving some years later. The British Library has only this year made a small archive of British Web publications publicly accessible, and it uses the digital archiving system software developed by the National Library of Australia.

In addition, when the Bibliotheque Nationale de France led the setting up of the International Internet Preservation Consortium in 2003 to develop web archiving methodologies and tools, it invited the National Library to be a founding member, because of its internationally recognised expertise in this area.

The PANDORA Archive is a selective archive of Australian online publications and websites, which is built collaboratively by ten Australian cultural collecting agencies and hosted at the National Library. Currently it contains almost 9000 publications and websites, many of which are re-archived on a regular basis to capture updated content. Approximately 43 per cent of the titles in the Archive are government publications.

To supplement this selective Archive the ...