Archiving Web Resources 2004

Some Dinner Venue!

We're back now for day three of the conference, following the lavish dinner at New Parliament House last night. Robin Dale from the Research Libraries Group begins the day's proceedings, which focus this morning on the topic of collaboration. She points out that in the current environment collaboration is increasingly important, and in such collaborations, the issue of mutual trust, and trust in the content repositories, becomes particularly crucial. How can trust be established, and trustworthiness assessed?

Up next is Australian Chief Scientist Robin Batterham, speaking on the use of the Web by Australian scientists. The nature of science is changing, not least because of the impact of the Web. The best direction for it isn't quite clear yet.

The is now a significant level of information on the impact of scientific research, and Robin shows what's called Australia's research footprint (measured in terms of output, citations, researchers as percentage of the workforce, etc.), where Australia rates well, but not necessarily at the very top. However, the nature of scientific work has changed towards much larger-scale collaboration across national boundaries, as well as towards a concentration of research around a small number of particularly excellent institutions. The information used to measure such outcomes is itself a result of the information revolution which the Web and other related tools have brought about. Science is also increasingly cross- or transdisciplinary.

Paolo Cherchi Usai, the Director of ScreenSound Australia at the National Screen and Sound Arcive, begins the next session. He points to what he calls the death of cinema - the move from traditional audiovisual to digital production in screen and sound. Thus, most of the material produced today can be viewed electronically, via Websites. Audiovisual materials have never been this widely accessible before. This raises problems as well as opportunities, however:

1. Is it true that the Web is going to make accessible more moving images and audiovisual works?
2. Is the Web going to improve the quality of access?
3. Is the issue of accessibility going to interfere with a mandate of preserving materials?

The first answer ist yes; however, the growth of Web archiving will exacerbate the conflict between the urge to create material and the imperative of legal ownership. Archives are being strangled by legal frameworks here; today, their right to archive is being challenged (or indeed besieged), and openly contested. A possible solution for the future may be in the library rather than archive framework; in libraries, freedom of access has been protected from the implications of copyright and legal ownership.

The conference begins with a welcome from Jan Fullerton, the Director-General of the National Library of Australia. She sets the scene by noting the relevance of Web materials as yet another slice of contemporary culture which needs to be archived by national libraries - but of course the archiving of such material is complex and unprecedented, especially also because of the significant increase in the volume of material. Therefore, cooperative approaches to archiving are required.

The NLA's PANDORA archive of Web resources is now being recognised as a significant resource by UNESCO, and has been nominated for the UNESCO world register for the memory of the world. This is a significant achievement and points to the significance of what the NLA has already managed to do. Other national libraries around the world are also involved in Web archiving now, of course, with often some very different approaches to the process - this variety is interesting in itself. Now, of course, there is the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), which aims to interoperate such approaches.