Preserving electronic publications

Scientific journals are more and more published electronically. Gradually the amount of e-books increases and on Internet a vast amount of digital information is being published. Electronic publishing offers major opportunities for dissemination and for access but at the same time imposes new challenges on national libraries and other deposit institutes in charge of preserving countries’ cultural heritage. The challenges that have to be addressed are preservation of the electronic publications. In the past years national libraries have taken the lead in developing practical solutions for digital preservation. Together with IBM both the Koninklijke Bibliotheek – national library of the Netherlands – and the British Library – national library of England – are developing an OAIS compliant deposit system. The system of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek will be operational at the end of 2002 and will be the core of the Electronic Deposit of the Netherlands. As a deposit system could not be bought of the shelf, the approach chosen was to team up with a major ICT partner and jointly develop the deposit system. Parallel with the development of the deposit system, the aspects of long-term access were investigated. A proof of concept was done by IBM with ‘data preservation’ using a Universal Virtual Computer (UVC). The Koninklijke Bibliotheek and IBM jointly will soon publish a series of reports on the long-term preservation aspects of a deposit system.