A key conclusion of the Conference was
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.
Australia was an early implementer of web archiving. Since 1996 the National Library of Australia has been developing and maintaining PANDORA, an archive of selected, significant Australian web sites and web-based online publications6. The purpose of PANDORA is to ensure that Australians of the future will be able to access a significant component of today’s Australian web based information resources.
Because of the high cost of selective web archiving, it makes sense for one 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 being built by the Australian state
1 July 2008 - 12:00
An article by David Pearson and Colin Webb. This paper talks about the nature of file format obsolescence and a series of prototype questions designed by the National Library as a benchmark to help assess file format obsolescence. The article was published in the International Journal of Digital Curation, Vol 3, No 1 (2008).
Introduction
We know that in our information-obsessed world, change is everything. And yet some information is required to live beyond the moment; some information is valued beyond tomorrow’s headlines, and must be managed to be accessible, usable, and understandable in the long term.
Cycles of change in file formats impinge on even the most casual users of digital data. Technological change and format obsolescence are potentially major problems for every repository manager and data user. This is particularly true given the ever- increasing reliance on digital storage and distribution of information, the plethora of file formats, the dyn