Virtual Preservation: How Has Digital Culture Influenced Our Ideas about Permanence? Changing Practice in a National Legal Deposit Library

This two-part article considers how digital culture has influenced ideas about permanence. It examines the change in collecting practices in one legal deposit library. The author considers how the idea of permanence, understood in cultural heritage terms, influences digital culture, and, thus, digital technology. The first part of the article addresses the concepts associated with permanence, digital culture, digital technology, social change, and cultural institutions, in relation to collecting digital cultural material. The second part focuses on changing collecting practices of the Alexander Turnbull Library at the National Library of New Zealand for electronically published material with the benefit of legal deposit. Outline The first part of this article considers the concepts associated with permanence, digital culture, digital technology, social change, and cultural institutions, in relation to collecting digital cultural material. This is intended to place the change in collecting practices, outlined in the second part of the article, in the context of an evolving understanding of how these concepts might be interpreted and are being applied. The second part focuses on the change in collecting practices of the Alexander Turnbull Library (Turnbull Library) as it develops its heritage collection of electronically published material with the benefit of legal deposit,1 with particular attention to the change in practice to include the collection of online publications. Virtual Preservation: How Has Digital Culture Influenced Our Ideas about Permanence? Changing Practice in a National Legal Deposit Library