1 February 2017 - 12:00
In February 2016 the legal deposit provisions in Australia’s Copyright Act were expanded to include digital publications and the public .au web domain. The result of twenty years of advocacy, the new provisions marked a dramatic shift in how Australia collects, preserves and makes accessible the full online publishing landscape.
Legal deposit has been the core of the National Library’s collections and services since it was introduced in Australia in 1912. It remains the most important mechanism by which national and state libraries can preserve the published record of their countries or states. But since the emergence of electronic publishing in the 1980s and online publishing in the 1990s, the Australian legal deposit scheme has been only performing half its role.
Overview
The Australian METS Profile describes the rules and requirements for using METS as an exchange format to support the collection and preservation of and access to content in Australian digital repositories. The profile was developed as part of the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) Project, a collaboration of the National Library of Australia, the Australian National University, the University of Sydney and the University of Queensland. In 2006 a draft profile for exchange of digital objects between repositories was developed as part of the APSR/PRESTA Project. This new version of the profile is based on and refines this work. More information about this project may be found on the APSR wiki.