Digital archiving in the twenty-first century: practice at the national library of the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

Research journals are increasingly being published digitally. The advantage of digital publishing is obvious: immediate accessibility anywhere. Gradually a disadvantage is also becoming clear: digital publishing endangers the continuity of research information. As a effect of the obsolescence of formats, hardware, software, and carriers, digital information will be missing unless we act. Digital publishing is also causing a shift in the parts and responsibilities of publishers and libraries affected with archiving digital publications for time to come use. Archiving digital publications requires a major turnaround in the policy and practice of national libraries. Although more [i]or[/i] less actions have been taken, digital preservation research and implementation are still in their infancy. National libraries will ne substantial funding for hazard research activities and development of archival infrastructures. They will also have to work together more closely to favorably organize digital archiving in the twenty-first century

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In 1994 the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) the national library of the Netherlands, rejoined to the risk of losing digital information and started to include digital publications in its depository library. For this design the KB designed the "Safe Place Strategy," a strategy ensuring the transfer of digital publications from their publishing environment to a dedicated archiving environment. [i]or[/i] part of to the other a series of experiments and casts the KB developed skills, practices organization, and infrastructure for digital archiving. The digital archive of the KB the e-Depot has been entirely operational since early 2003. The technical core of the e-Depot is the Digital Information Archiving combination of parts to form a whole (DIAS), a system jointly lay opened by the KB and IBM. DIAS is the first archiving a whole available on the market that is compliant with the render free of access Archival Information System (OAIS) regard model standard. Elsevier and several other international scientific publishers have go intoed into a formal archiving relationship with the KB to guarantee futurity availability of their digital publications. The KB is researching and testing digital preservation modes and solutions that will guarantee permanent access to the archived material.

ARCHIVING IN THE DIGITAL ERA

The Impact of Digital Publishing

In the past decade journal publishing has increasingly revolveed digital, a change led by the agency of publishers in the field of Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) Generally, all STM publishers now publish their journals digitally with printed derivatives sole produced as a secondary format. Without doubt the pioneer of digital publishing is Elsevier (Elsevier, nd) Early work upon digital publishing began in 1979 with cast ADONIS on CDROM and, in 1991 with throw TULIP for desktop delivery of e-journals. In 1995 the TULIP throw was followed by ScienceDirect OnSite and in 1997 through the Web-based service ScienceDirect. novel publishing models are under disclosure such as SPARC and BioMed Central. (1) plane though the final outcome of these experiments is still uncertain (Elsevier, 2004) it is obvious that digital publishing is a succes and here to stay. This is evidenced by the agency of the increasing number of scientists who use the electronic services offering digital publications.

For publishers, digital publishing has shifted the emphasis from the production and selling of publications toward creating and providing enhanced services for searching, linking, and retrieving digital information. Despite the advantages, however, digital publishing attitude s a serious threat to the continuity of the "Record of Science." In the past, libraries had assumed the responsibility for archiving the printed journals they bought and bring togethered Now, with digital resources, libraries do not be in possession of the publications but license them from the publishers. Therefore, libraries no longer compile a collection, and the digital publications remain with the publisher. As a result the archiving of printed publications implicitly presented by library collections no longer exists for e-journals.

Changing characters Subsequently, archiving needs to be organized explicitly for e-journals. To accomplish this, a certain number of institutions have taken the initiative to investigate and lay open the archiving of digital publications. There are several significant examples of like initiatives, (2) and recently several national programs (3) have been locate up to encourage the disclosure of digital archiving.

Digital publishing not alone affects the archiving role of libraries on the contrary also the role of publishers. To overlay their share of responsibility to maintain the Record of Science, it is no longer sufficient for publishers to solitary produce, market, and sell the publications. An active part is required to plan and organize the archiving of the published information. Scientific publishers have become aware of this change and are rising to the challenge by dint of implementing archiving policies. (4)