The dead-tree media forms were dominated by scarcity. Publishing was capital intensive and only very popular works were widely distributed. Digital media has broken the back of scarcity in this area, but for librarians this poses several challenges. Digital works are often transient and do not persist for several centuries as a book does. The National Library of Australia has also identified another issue - rapid technoligical development of formats means they require a technological response to keeping old formats readable.

The Australian Flying Corps website was recently archived by the Pandora Archive . The AFC site is a good example of digital volatility.

It has existed since 1997 in one form or another. Since 1999 when it become large single focused website it was in static HTML files. This became hard to manage, so I rewrote the site in XML and transformed it with its navigations etc using ant in about 2002. This was mainly as I had it on a cheap hosting plan that didn't enable any dynamic possibility. More recently I changed it to scoop.

I maintained an archive of each of its previous iterations which made it easier for Pandora to grab it all into their system. But each permutation of the site carries different information, and is more complete in some areas, and weaker in others. So there is value in all of them to be archived.

They all output to HTML despite being generated from different primary data. It may be in the future that HTML is not used anymore and suddenly the library will have the equivalent of reams and reams of archives that are not readable in the current computers.

Anyone who has had to transfer an old application from a mainframe or proprietary Unix to a more modern system knows that pain.

In response the National Library of Australia has come up with a Digital Preservation Policy . This includes challenges such as;

• Widespread use of relatively unstable media (floppy, writable cdrom etc)
• Rapid changes in the availability of hardware, software and other technology required for access
• The diverse and frequently changing range of file formats and standards
• Uncertainty about the significant properties that must be maintained for different digital resources

Librarians were always an unusual mix of historian, anthropologist and technologist. Now it appears a Computer Science degree is becoming a priority.

Personally I would find that fascinating, not only for the data that it is archiving, but the challenges to making old data accesible and keeping the formats readable. It must be a fun, yet stressful, time to be a librarian.

cam

More Reading on Pandora archive

• Pandora Archive
• National Library of Australia
• Technological Challenges for the Modern Librarian