It was 1996 when digital preservation practitioners worldwide made the first steps on the way to become a profession. Let’s celebrate 30 years of digital preservation!
For centuries national libraries collected the printed publications of their country, often supported by a legal mandate, better known as legal deposit. France was the first country to regulate this in 1537, other countries followed, in some cases like in The Netherlands on a voluntary base. The digital developments in the last century resulted in publications on CD-ROMS, as e-books, in databases and on the Web. It became clear that the existing legislation for print material was not sufficient for the so-called “non-print material”. The national libraries feared that they no longer could fulfil their mission to compile the national bibliography and to preserve a complete collection of the national output, both in print and electronically.
The Conference of National European Librarians (CENL), established in 1987, decided in 1995 to research the consequences of the new media for legal deposit. With financial support of the European Commission, John Mackenzie Owen and Jan van der Walle, both from the Dutch organisation NBBI Project Bureau for Information Management took up this challenge.
In 1996 their report with an eye-catching yellow cover, was published: Deposit collections of electronic publications https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/7071-deposit-collections-of-electronic-publications known as the ELDEP report.
The authors had 3 objectives: to identify classes of electronic materials, to assess technical options for storage and access to clarify issues of preservation of these materials and to identify approaches to bibliographic control. Their conclusions were based on literature research and interviews with stakeholders, like publishers and national libraries pioneering in digital preservation like France, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands.
It was clear that from the beginning of digital developments, national libraries shared one starting point. In order to preserve “the intellectual record of the information society for future generations”(…) there is no reason for a legal distinction between electronic and non-electronic publications with regard to deposit”, said the report. But there were issues to overcome.
The report gives an interesting overview of the problems the libraries were faced with. Just to name a few. Publishers were experimenting with new publication channels and many national libraries were not prepared for the delivery and storage of these electronic materials. There was not a shared view between publishers and libraries about what should be preserved: the intellectual content (libraries) or the artefact with its specific look and feel (publishers). Publishers feared that their commercial interests would not be served by giving access in the library. They were also afraid that the easy way to manipulate digital material was a threat to authenticity. Authors – as a new kind of publishers – found new ways to publish, for example via the Web. These authors had never heard of legal deposit and were difficult to reach for national libraries to inform them about this. And what about the preservation of electronic materials?
The report summarized their findings in clear messages, packed in “guidelines”. Guidelines for libraries to select electronic material: “Focus on materials which are relatively easy to handle”. Guidelines for publishers – which we later recognize in the OAIS responsibilities paragraph – stating for example “The deposit library’s right to copy the publication for conservation purposes, and the right to provide access to the publication for on-site consultation should be confirmed in writing on deposit by the publisher”. The report offers selection criteria for national libraries. It contains a chapter about long term preservation, with advise about the storage medium, migration strategies and emulation. The last one is seen as a promising but as yet underdeveloped strategy. It would take years before this became a shared opinion in the preservation world.
During a meeting between national libraries and publishers in 1995 at the premises of the European Commission in Luxembourg to discuss the findings in the report, the national libraries and publishers agreed to start talks, via the Federation of European Publishers.
The CENL group initiated the ELDEP research when the deposit problem was relatively small but serious enough to worry. The ELDEP report can be seen as a catalyst in this matter and inspired many national libraries to regulate the deposit activity, also outside Europe. Nowadays legal deposit worldwide often includes electronic materials, but this took in many cases several years to achieve.