Preserving Large-Scale Cultural Heritage: the Case for Collaboration
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Preserving large-scale cultural heritage: the case for collaboration Anne-Marie Schwirtlich, Director-General, National Library of Australia It is a great honour and pleasure to be addressing you today and I pass on the greetings of Australian colleagues. Australia has been a keen observer and participant in CONSAL meetings since the very first conference in Singapore in 1970. How far we have all come since then! Introduction The large-scale loss of cultural heritage materials can happen for a number of reasons. It can happen when important cultural heritage content is lost to society because it was never collected and stored by the appropriate institution, whether library, archive, museum or gallery. It can happen when institutions themselves fail to take appropriate care of their collections which become degraded and inaccessible. It can happen when even the most careful attention cannot prevent the natural degradation of physical materials caused by time itself, such as the crumbling pages of thread-bound books or brittle newsprint. Cultural heritage is also lost when collections are damaged and destroyed by natural disasters, such as earthquake, tsunami or fire. [slides 2,3,4] These events are beyond our control, although much can be done to protect our buildings and collections from the risk of natural disaster. Worst of all perhaps [slide 5], cultural heritage is lost at times of war and conflict due to looting and deliberate destruction, as we are seeing now in some parts of the world. Tragically, we are powerless to prevent this. What can heritage collecting institutions do, then, to preserve their collections on a large scale? My presentation focuses on two strategies. Firstly, large-scale collecting to protect digital heritage materials that are outside library collections and in danger of loss, namely web-based publications and websites. And, secondly, 1 employing large-scale digitisation to preserve and make accessible fragile collection content, focusing on historical Australian newspapers. Overall, I want to emphasise the role of collaboration and cooperation in the successful achievement of these important tasks. Setting the scene At the National Library of Australia, we build and manage a set of rapidly growing and complex digital collections. [slide 6] In June 2015 these collections comprised about 3,500 terabytes of data. [slide 7] They include archived copies of Australian websites; digitised copies of historic Australian newspapers; digitised copies of oral history and other audio files; digitised copies of analogue collection items such as pictures, music scores, maps, and manuscripts, and a small collection of digital photographs and personal archives. In addition to the digital collections we also build and manage physical collections of over 6 million volumes, housed in a heritage building in Canberra and two off-site storage repositories. Our staff numbers are around 410 Full Time Equivalents, and have been reducing each year in line with government budget requirements. It is therefore critical for us to make the best use of our scarce resources as we take on the ever-growing demands of both digital and physical collection management and preservation. So why is collaboration such an important principle? To explain this, I’d like to share with you a comment made by the International Internet Preservation Consortium some years ago about the obstacles to preserving the web. [Slide 8] The Consortium noted that: The task is too large for individual institutions to undertake in isolation and the resources required for successful and sustained archiving are too great to make duplication of effort a tenable position. 2 We agree! Models for collaboration Thinking of digital collections, what types of collaboration are of the most use to us in the long term? Broadly speaking, we see four groupings where collaboration most fruitfully occurs [Slide 9]: Content custodians (such as national and research libraries, major archives, universities that maintain repositories of research outputs, and data archive centres) who are committed to long term preservation, including tackling the problem of obsolescence; Communities of practice and information exchange (standards bodies, digital preservation experts, relevant professional associations); Providers of services (such as infrastructure providers, software developers, registry services, identifier resolution services); and Capacity building organisations (such as development organisations, funders of research, curriculum developers, non-government organisations). Since we began to build our digital collections, we have found many opportunities to collaborate with institutions facing similar challenges, and with other stakeholders. Over the years these partners have included overseas national libraries, other Australian cultural institutions, university libraries, agencies developing relevant software, and standards bodies. Our experience has shown that collaborations between different groupings can have interesting and useful outcomes, such as a partnership between the National Library and a university-funded research project to develop a standard or pilot a new service. These have often provided us with new information and learning which has deepened our knowledge or informed our practice. Some collaborations within groupings, such as between the National Library and its state library counterparts in Australia have had long-lasting 3 strategic outcomes. The more successful of these have, in fact, been transformational, and I would like to look at two in detail. Web archiving The need to collect and retain a record of a society’s cultural expression on the web is now well understood. The medium is highly vulnerable, in respect to content at least. Content can disappear without trace. There is no physical artefact or remnant for later, retrospective, collecting. As an example, the following sites archived by the National Library through a selective permissions-based approach have now disappeared from the live web: [Slide 10] Most sites associated with the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, including the official Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games site. [Slide 11] the website of John Howard, while he was our Prime Minister between 1998 and 2007 [Slide 12] A number of e-journals including: o Digital Technology Law Journal (1999-2004) o Asian Linguistics & Language Teaching (2002-2006) o The Zeitgeist Gazette o Journal of Sports Marketing (1998-2001) [Slide 13] the APEC Australia 2007 website (2007) [Slide 14] the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission website (2006) Treatynow.org (2002-2005) Forgotten Australians (2009) Most sites associated with the 1998 Australian Constitutional Convention and 1999 Australian Republic Referendum. Most sites associated with the Centenary of Federation (2001) Most campaign websites of Federal and State elections from 1996 onwards (e.g. jeff.com.au, Kevin07). 4 Online Australia – the Commonwealth Government’s first initiative to build online communities (1998-2000); also, GovOnline.gov.au (2002) and Culture.gov.au : Australia’s Culture Portal (2010). The Australian Firearms Buyback website (2000) The Paralysis Tick of Australia (2001-2002); and The Jabiluka Uranium Mine Blockade website (1999) As a publishing medium that more and more people can engage in, collecting web materials allows us to understand our society over time in ways that have not been so possible in the past – provided we collect and preserve the record. More and more ‘grey literature’ – that is, documents produced by entities that are not in the commercial business of publishing, that support and inform policy and research – is published online only because of the cheap and convenient means of publishing afforded by the web. Without web archiving we run the risk of allowing the proverbial ‘digital black hole’ to prevail in our cultural, social and intellectual memory. Never has there been larger-scale cultural heritage that urgently requires preservation. But how are we as library and collection institutions to deal with it? The PANDORA Project The need to cooperate with other collecting institutions to achieve effective results was very much the thinking behind the National Library’s development of the PANDORA web archive in 1996.[Slide 15] PANDORA is a selective web archive, prioritising content with a high research value while also ensuring we collect and preserve a broad sample of material representing the range of online culture and publication relating to Australia and Australians. One of the reasons for taking a selective approach is so that we can manage the negotiation of permissions so that all the content collected for the PANDORA Archive can be made freely available to the public. 5 Because of the high cost of selective web archiving, it makes sense for a lead agency (such as a national library) to develop both the expertise and the infrastructure for web archiving, and for other agencies to leverage off this investment. Accordingly, PANDORA is a collaborative activity, as the archive is built by the Australian state libraries and some other cultural institutions in addition to the National Library. This activity is an example of collaboration between content custodians. Today, 11 participants, including the National Library, jointly curate the PANDORA Archive. [slide 16] This includes all state and territory libraries, with the exception of the Australian Capital Territory library service and the state library of Tasmania.