For institutions developing a digital library, there are a number of issues to be faced, including assuring long-term preservation and access, applying appropriate metadata standards, and addressing issues in the area of intellectual property and user authentication. Libraries also require a new legislative mandate to enable them to collect digital publications.  Digitization also changes the traditional relationship between librarian and user, and there is evidence that users use digital texts and digital libraries very differently from paper based objects. 
 

The National Library of New Zealand's digital library

The National Library of New Zealand has made considerable progress towards developing a digital library. The Library has several pilot digital collections available which combined contain more than 325,000 images, including pictures, text, sound and video.  The development of these collections has enabled the Library to test formatting, storage, search and retrieval technologies for digital objects, and digitization strategies for the various formats that the Library holds and to learn more about the practicalities of managing a digital library. The considerable knowledge gained through these projects is now being utilized as the Library puts in place the policy and technical infrastructure required to support the large quantities of digital objects that will eventually make up the digital library. 

The digital library will hold digital objects created from physical originals as part of our ongoing digitization programme.  The new Papers Past online collection is an example of this, containing over 300,000 pages from 19th century New Zealand newspapers, with another 100,000 images to be added by July 2002.  The digitization programme is enabling the Library to make items from its collections available to all New Zealanders rather than just those who are able to make a personal visit, and to increase access to rare and fragile items while preserving the original documents from wear and tear. 

The digital library will also enable the Library to preserve and provide access to the increasing number of publications that are being produced only electronically, for example web sites and e-journals.  This will include the ability to capture information that is only available for a short time around a specific event, for example a general election. The proposed amendments to the National Library Act include the expansion of the Legal Deposit provision to include electronic formats. 

Library staff have also been corresponding and collaborating with their international peers. The IT infrastructure that underpins the Library's present systems was selected with a view to its capacity to support digital collections, and the Library has formed a close relationship with other libraries that share this technology, notably Cornell University and the Getty Research Institute.  More generally, senior staff are active in the international library community where the future of world's digital libraries is being made. 

Significant collections of New Zealand documentary heritage are held in other New Zealand libraries, and in libraries outside New Zealand. A digital library offers the potential to bring these distributed collections together into a single virtual collection.  The Library is already collaborating with other New Zealand institutions in the development of the Curriculum Online Resource to be launched in early 2002.  It will provide schools with electronic access to materials relating to music and the visual arts at the senior levels of the curriculum.  The material available will include paintings, posters, prints and manuscripts, cartoons and photographs, sound and video images from the collections held by the Library and other New Zealand institutions.  Further opportunities for collaboration and co-operation will be explored at a national digitization forum being organized by the Library in 2002. 

Digitization also creates the opportunity to build a digital library that extends beyond the confines of the National Library of New Zealand. Attendees at the August 2001 meeting of the Conference of Directors of National Libraries (CDNL) had the opportunity to hear the Chief Executive of the British Library talk about The European Library.  This initiative will combine the resources of a number of Europe's national libraries into a virtual library providing search and access facilities to a wide range of digital and other collections.  As the national libraries of Asia and Oceania build their own digital collections, the possibility of a similar initiative in our region increases.