Budget cash may help stave off a predicted "digital Dark Ages" by funding the archival of important national information available only in electronic form.
More than 90% of all thoughts put into material form today are coded as digital data, says National Library chief Penny Carnaby, meaning it can easily be deleted or become unreadable.
“The worry is that in 10 years’ time we could enter what some have called the digital Dark Ages," Carnaby says. Digital information, whether in text, sound or picture and video form, enshrines such landmarks of recent New Zealand history as the America’s Cup defences and the making of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy.
“How do we harvest New Zealand’s web presence, the huge amount of stuff that’s never seen in print?”
So she takes some comfort from a grant of $24 million over four years given to the library in this year’s Budget to handle the extension of “legal deposit” of documents to the digital world.
New Zealand is one of the first countries to extend into digital works the requirement to deposit two copies of every “publication” produced with the National Library; one for archiving and one for the public to access.
It will be difficult, she acknowledges, to define what a “publication” is for these purposes. “That needs to be worked on, and we’re about to start talking to publishers about it. But we’ve already started harvesting what’s in the public domain.”
There is also the vexed question of digital rights management -- protecting the rights of the author and publisher when digital material is made available widely. The e-government unit has expressed concern that such protection may already be going too far.
The library has to “provide good leadership in digital preservation”, she says.
Carnaby sees this policy as aligning with the government’s recently released ICT strategy and extending it. “Government talks about the three C’s: connection — access to information; content -– so there’s something on the networks to access; and confidence — knowing how to access it [and what is trustworthy]. There’s a fourth C that should be added to that, and that’s ‘continuity’ — preserving the nation’s digital memory. Very few countries have given much attention to that, and it's good to see the New Zealand government with funding helping to put one building block of that into place.”