I have been following with interest the recent discussion of the
copyright issues relating to archiving the Web and wish to comment on
points made by Edward Barrow and Michael Day.

At the National Library of Australia we have decided that we need to be
more selective in preserving the nation's output on the Internet than we
are in print.  The volume of publications being produced and the
questionable value of much of it, combined with limited resources to
undertake the work has dictated this approach.  We have developed
selection guidelines <http://www.nla.gov.au/1/scoap/scoapgui.html> which
give priority to Australian publications that are authoritative, of
research value (broadly interpreted) and that contain information not
available elsewhere.  This excludes everything with a print equivalent.
We do also seek to include in the archive less scholarly material, on an
exemplar basis, which represents the wide spectrum of publications that
Australians are putting up on the Internet and illustrates Australian
society and culture in the 1990s.  We may, therefore, archive a 'pet
portrait' but only as an example and certainly not all pet portraits.

Before archiving a title, we seek the permission of the publisher, so we
avoid the copyright problem that has been experienced by Alexa.  This
does not, however, eliminate intellectual property rights considerations
and we are careful to point out to users of the archive that they should
observe copyright law in their use of the material. Negotiation with
publishers is labour intensive and could only be considered where it is
intended to be selective.  

A potential disadvantage of the 'whole of Web' or 'whole of domain'
approach,  is the magnitude of the task or organising it and providing
effective access to it.  An advantage of the selective approach is that
we are able to facilitate access to the archived publications by
providing catalogue records for them in the National Bibliographic
Database, with links from the Library's online public access catalogue
to both the publisher's site and the copy in the archive.

There is room for both the comprehensive and selective approaches and it
is informative to compare the relative experiences to see what can be
learned from both.

The NLA feels strongly that preservation of electronic publications is
the responsibility of deposit libraries.  As the national library we are
consulting with colleagues in the Australian State libraries (also
deposit libraries) regarding a national digital archive, which would see
all the deposit libraries eventually contributing in some way to enable
to coverage of the Australian documentary heritage online to be as broad
as possible.

Margaret Phillips


Margaret E Phillips
Manager
Australian Electronic Unit
National Library of Australia
[log in to unmask]
61 2 6262 1140


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