No. 136, April 2004

Digital Preservation Specialists
from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek’s visit to the NDL

The National Diet Library is now making efforts to establish a system for collecting online information resources, preserving digital information and making it accessible to the public. Focusing on this objective, the NDL held a lecture meeting and a discussion session on March 3 and 5, 2004, having as lecturers three specialists from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands; KB), which has already put such a project (called "e-Depot") into practice. The lecturers from the KB were Dr. Johan F. Steenbakkers, Director of Information Technology and Facility Management, Mr. Hans Jansen, Head of the Research & Development Division, and Dr. Hilde van Wijngaarden, Digital Preservation Officer. The lecture meeting attracted 69 NDL staff and 15 people from other institutions. The program was as follows:

In the lecture meeting and session, the lecturers reported that the KB, which gives first priority to long-term storage of electronic journals rather than web archiving, acquired 55,000 articles per day from Elsevier and other publishers that had agreements with the KB to deposit their electronic publications. They developed and used DIAS (Digital Information Archiving System), a system for digital preservation which conformed to the OAIS reference model which had been approved as the ISO Standard for digital archiving.

They pointed out that we were no longer in an environment where we could define the scope of acquisition by national borders in collecting digital information, and stated that the KB was a "change-driven" organization. We realized that it was such attitudes that had driven them to put the "e-Depot" system into practice, supported by their existing acquisition system that was based not on legal obligation but on voluntary agreements between the KB and publishers.

From right: Mr. Jansen, Dr. van Wijngaarden, interpreter, Dr. Steenbakkers

Discussion session