No. 121, September 2001

Result of the survey of electronic
information resources on the Internet

Electronic Library Development Office

This is an abridged translation of the article of  the same title in the NDL Monthly Bulletin No. 484

1 Outline of the Survey

(1) Background—progress of the Internet

As the Internet and other telecommunication and information technologies progress rapidly, online electronic resources such as online magazines are expanding their quality and quantity every day. Such electronic publications are not preserved like former publications in paper form, and after revising, changing and deleting, most of the original information is lost. To use online electronic publications as valuable resources and compile and preserve them—these are big challenges for the library.

(2) Acquisition policy for online electronic publications

Law No. 37, April 7, 2000, revising the National Diet Library Law, became effective on October 1, 2000. In accordance with this revision, we started to acquire offline electronic publications such as CD-ROMs, DVDs and videotapes through the legal deposit system. As for the online electronic publications, we revised "Guidelines for acquisition of materials" (Librarian's Decision No. 8, September 22, 2000), which prescribes that "the Library will select online electronic publications (texts, images, sounds or programs distributed via telecommunication lines) according to their usefulness for library services and acquire them by means other than the legal deposit system".

(3) Object and outline of the survey

A questionnaire on electronic resources on the Internet was conducted in order to grasp the present situation of online electronic information resources and clarify the problems related to acquisition and preservation. We also added some questions to ask institutions that are providing electronic resources how they would cooperate with us in acquisition and preservation. We distributed the questionnaire to the institutions below and about 2,300 of them responded.

List of institutions

Kind of institution	Round number	Response rate (%)
Administrative agencies (central government offices, etc.)	200	70.9
Research institutes (public and private)	1,600	58.5
Associations and societies	1,200	51.9
Libraries (academic, prefectural and major municipal libraries)	700	86.0
Total	3,700	62.4

2. The present situation of online electronic information resources 

(1) Outline 

Most institutions of every kind have set up or plan to set up their own web sites. Of the contents of these web sites, public information is the most numerous, but, for example, half of the central government offices provide useful and practical resources such as statistical reports, council and committee papers, white papers, annual reports and survey reports. Of the research institutions, 30% provide survey reports. Over 60% of associations and societies provide or plan to provide in-house magazines online and many libraries, especially academic libraries, are digitizing bulletins and dissertations. The academic value of these web sites cannot be ignored. 

(2) Organization 

To add metadata and organize online electronic resources, it is desirable that basic metadata, such as title and author, equal to the bibliographic data given in the colophon of a book, have been described in the original data. But according to the results of this questionnaire, awareness of or interest in metadata seems to be at quite a low level. 

(3) Preservation 

Even though useful and valuable resources are provided on the Internet, few institutions provide clear-cut guidelines for preserving these resources. 

(4) Conclusion 

The Internet does not have a long history and careful thought has not yet been given to its organization and preservation. But within the next 10 or 20 years, it should become very important to preserve electronic resources in an organized way, the value of the project to society is also enormous. 

3. Problems and strategies of acquisition and preservation

(1) Permission for acquisition and its problems 

To acquire online electronic resources, we assume that the permission of the publisher institutions will be offered in advance. We received favorable answers from many institutions. Significant problems showed in these answers are below: 

(i) Complexity of negotiations 
To acquire these resources, we assume that separate negotiations are needed with each source of supply. But the problem is that there would be several different parties involved, such as institutions providing resources, institutions discussing the propriety of granting permission, distributors and individual copyright holders. 

(ii) Preservation of deleted information 
Some institutions answered that after updating, old files should be deleted, or, that they do not want information that the institute itself deletes to be preserved. This is because they are concerned that deleted information that the institute considers as unwanted would be preserved in the library. But it could be said that to preserve deleted information and provide it for both present and future use is an important service that libraries should provide. 

(2) Methods of acquisition and problems 

We assume three ways of acquiring online electronic resources: 

(i)   Use Web Robot

(ii)  Online transfer via NDL web site and e-mail from publisher

(iii) Offline transfer such as floppy disk and CD-R from publisher

Only 10 to 20% of the institutions answered that they would give unconditional permission to acquire resources by the methods of (ii) and (iii). But 54% of them answered that they would allow Web Robot acquisition without conditions. This indicates that they do not feel much resistance toward labor-saving automatic acquisition such as Web Robot. We need to prepare acquisition standards and develop systems based on automatic means. 

(3) Other problems 

(i) Links 
Hyper links to the information resources on the Internet have already been made by subject gateways of academic libraries and commercial search engines; about 70% of the institutions answered there is no problem in making links. 

(ii)  Announcement 
We asked about the possibility of announcing changes of electronic information such as the opening of new sites, revision and deletion. But only 10% of them indicated this possibility without conditions and most of them seem to be concerned about workload and lack of manpower. 

(iii) Databases 
When databases exist in the web sites, it is technically impossible to acquire these databases by Web Robot. But 10 to 20 % of the institutions operate databases and the operation rate of central government offices reaches 45%. These contents are mainly white papers and annual reports. 

(iv) Access restrictions 
About 10% of the institutions impose restrictions upon those electronic resources which are not expected to be available to the general public. We need to take flexible steps to acquire and provide such resources. 

(v) Data conversion 
To preserve resources over a long span of time, in some cases it is necessary to convert data into standard formats such as text file. The institutions willing to come to an agreement about data conversion reached 60 to 70%; very few are unwilling. 

4. Conclusion

This survey is of great value in discussing problems of electronic information resources on the Internet. To develop the Electronic Library System, we plan to make metadata of the resources and operate experimental acquisition of them in the near future.