No. 169, October 2009

National Diet Library Law Amended: the NDL authorized to archive websites of government-related institutions

This article is a translation of the article in Japanese of the same title
in Current Awareness-E No. 154 (July 2009).

The Act for Partially Revising the National Diet Library Law (Law No. 73 of 2009) was enacted on July 10, 2009. This law enables the National Diet Library (NDL) to copy and collect Internet information, such as websites, produced by government and government-related institutions. The law will come into force on April 1, 2010.

The institutions affected are government departments, local authorities, independent administrative agencies and national universities; in other words, organs obliged to deposit their publications to the NDL under the Article 24 and 24-2 of the National Diet Library Law.

Collecting is mainly expected to be automatically carried out by a web crawler. The targeted institutions are required to disable security settings they have in place that hinders the NDL’s crawler. In practical terms, it means the modification of robots.txt file on the relevant site. It is also a duty of the targeted institutions to provide the NDL at its request with information unavailable for automated archiving but notified in advance by the Librarian of the NDL to be highly worth collecting (e.g. a periodical previously published in paper form but has since migrated to the web). The public notice will be announced some time before April 1, 2010.

The duties above do not apply to (1) items which possess entirely different characteristics from traditional publications and are meant to replace routine office work (e.g. electronic tax system, facility reservation system) and (2) items meant for long-term accumulation and provision (e.g. database for academic papers) because in case of (2), long term storage and provision of internet information is already guaranteed. The NDL is expected, however, to collect the items in (2) in cases when they are likely to be lost for such reasons as termination of the relevant project.

The law revising the NDL law also includes the amendment to the Copyright Law exempting from copyright infringement copying in the process of collection specified above, whether carried out by the NDL or providing institutions.

The Internet information thus acquired will be treated in the same way as other library materials; it will be made available on the premises of the NDL and only permitted information will be provided via the Internet.

As for the Internet information produced by institutions not covered by this revision (such as private universities), the NDL continues collection, accumulation and provision based on permission through the Web Archiving Project (WARP), in operation since 2002.

up