Significant property: digital preservation at the British Library
| Pages | 17-20 |
| Date | 01 March 2004 |
| Published date | 01 March 2004 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/03055720410530942 |
| Author | Deborah Woodyard |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Significant property:
digital preservation at
the British Library
Deborah Woodyard
The author
Deborah Woodyard, Digital Preservation Coordinator,
The British Library, London, UK.
E-mail: Deborah.Woodyard@bl.uk
Keywords
Digital storage, United Kingdom, Libraries, Internet, Archives
Abstract
As national library, the British Library (BL) has the ethical and
legal responsibility to acquire, preserve and make available all
printed material published in the UK. In recent years the national
published output has included an increasingly digital
component. Therefore, projects such as those on collection and
management issues that focus on any part of the lifecycle of
digital materials, are important for the development of essential
steps toward their long term preservation. This can be seen in
the range of projects at the BL, including small projects focussed
on the initial acquisition in the life cycle through to major
programmes intending to incorporate exploration of long-term
digital preservation strategies.
Electronic access
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The British Library (BL) has a digital preservation
policy that is only two pages long[1]. Brevity is its
strength. It is high level, yet it promotes our
commitment to maintaining our digital
collections. It provides only broad details, which
ensures it is flexible. The policy can accommodate
a developmental approach to solving the
constantly changing and evolving challenges of
digital preservation as the BL learns through the
many projects being conducted.
As national library, the BL has the ethical and
legal responsibility to acquire, preserve and make
available all printed material published in the
UK[2]. This is enforced through legal deposit law.
In recent years the national published output has
included an increasingly digital component that is
not covered by the law. Legislation to extend legal
deposit to non-print publications made significant
progress through parliament in 2003 culminating
in Royal Assent in October[3]. Since January 2000
there has been voluntary deposit of some
electronic material that the BL will make available
to onsite readers and aims to preserve indefinitely
as supported in the BL’s strategic directions[4].
The BL collection of digital material also
extends beyond the deposit of publications. The
BL receives digital collection material through
several methods: deposit, purchase, capture and
creation. Such content arrives on disk or is online,
is in the form of CD-ROMs, CD-Rs, DVDs,
floppy disks, online publications and Web sites. It
can also exist in a multitude of logical formats such
as images, text, audio, executable, interactive
databases or geographic information systems. This
diversity adds several degrees of complication to
finding digital preservation solutions.
Preservation needs to be addressed throughout
the life cycle of digital material in order to be
effective. Appropriate steps must be introduced in
the acquisition and cataloguing stages, for
example, to ensure that technical and preservation
metadata is captured and managed and to
guarantee the digital files are not changed in any
way. Ignoring preservation and not performing
these tasks at this stage would be like putting a
book on the wrong shelf and never being able to
find it again or storing the book under a water drip
which causes the coated pages to get stuck
together. The information may still be between the
pages, or in a digital file, but you cannot see or use
it anymore.
Therefore, projects such as those on the
collection and management of digital materials
that focus on any part of the lifecycle are
contributing to the development of essential steps
toward digital preservation.
The variety of issues in the lifecycle of so many
different materials necessitates a variety of
VINE: The Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems
Volume 34 · Number 1 · 2004· pp. 17-20
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0305-5728
DOI 10.1108/03055720410530942
17
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