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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.

I'm heading off to Canberra on Monday, where I'm speaking at a conference on Archiving Web Resources organised by the National Library of Australia. My topic is "Contemporary Culture and the Web" - not an easy area to summarise in 30 minutes! This conference follows on from the IIPC meeting at the British Library which I attended in Septemb

I've spent the weekend updating the site of M/C - Media and Culture, for which I serve as General Editor. Phew - a lot of work, even though the placement students who designed the upgrade have done a fantastic job updating the look and feel of the site. The next step now is to upload the new issue, 'fame'; this should happen tonight, I hope.