No. 154, April 2007

Recent NDL lecture programs
by leaders from abroad

February6, 2007

Digital Preservation in Development

Ms. Nancy McGovern, Digital Preservation Officer, Inter- university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)

Handout distributed at the lecture (PDF: 289KB)

The National Diet Library (NDL) held a lecture meeting titled "Digital Preservation in Development" on February 6, 2007, inviting Ms. Nancy McGovern, Digital Preservation Officer, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).

She outlined the foundations of digital preservation and described the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) which has been approved as the ISO standard (ISO14721:2003)for long-term preservation of digital resources. She introduced the trends in the global digital preservation community and emphasized the need for self-assessment, audit and certification to monitor the functions of long-term digital preservation activities.

February 27, 2007

The Challenges of  Managing a National Library

Ms. Jan Fullerton, Director-General,

National Library of Australia

Handout distributed at the lecture (PDF: 2.27MB)

Ms. Jan Fullerton, Director-General of the National Library of Australia (NLA), was invited to the NDL and gave a lecture titled "The Challenges of Managing a National Library in the Digital Age."

She talked about what the NLA focused on in setting its goals and what services they strove to provide for achieving the goals. She introduced "Strategic Directions for 2006-2008" and explained that the NLA's major undertaking in that period would be to enhance learning and knowledge creation by further simplifying and integrating services that allow its users to find and get material, and by establishing new ways of collecting, sharing, recording, disseminating and preserving knowledge.

She said that collaboration with library colleagues, nationally and internationally, was critical in making progress in collecting and preserving online documents and introduced the NLA's partnership with the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). She also outlined the NLA's achievement in world-leading projects such as PANDORA and PictureAustralia. After showing NLA's projects and activities with a wealth of photo slides, she concluded that technology was important but we must never forget that our endeavors were to meet all the needs of people and that technology only helped us to do so.

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March 13,2007

Digital Library Initiatives at the National Library of the  Netherlands

Mr. Dirk J. Tang, Project Manager,
 National Library of the Netherlands

Handout distributed at the lecture (PDF: 1.65MB)

In March, the NDL invited Mr. Dirk J. Tang, Project Manager, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands; KB). He gave a lecture titled "Digital Library Initiatives at the National Library of the Netherlands" for the NDL staff members.

Mr. Tang introduced the history and current activities of the KB. The KB functions as a research library as well as a deposit library which collects domestic materials exhaustively based on agreements with publishers.

The KB promotes projects on acquisition and preservation of electronic resources and digitization. In 2002, it became the first national library to build a digital repository of academic resources (e-Depot). He outlined the "Policy Plan 2006-2009" whose main objectives are:

• Extending national programs on digitization
• Investing in mass digitization of minutes of the Dutch Parliament, newspapers and special & rare collections
• Integrating the catalogue of the European Library

He also introduced various electronic exhibitions and suggested a future cooperative project of an electronic exhibition between the KB and the NDL, referring to the Dutch-American relationship built through one of those exhibitions.

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