Policy Task Force Session – National Strategies for Digital Sustainability and Preservation
1. General introduction on UNESCO’s programmes and plans to support national
initiatives.
As we move into the increasingly complex digital world, those charged with preserving cultural
and documentary heritage have the opportunity to develop and establish better coordinated and
standardized preservation policies and practices to ensure what collections, archival material, TV
programs and related assets survive and are accessible to future generations. With the challenge
of digital preservation that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, collaboration for the
discovery of new ways of doing things is taking on increased importance. Emerging
collaborative projects tackle problems like developing new methodologies, establishing
standards and best practices, and developing procedures and tools for areas such as emulation
and data recovery.
In October 2003 the UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage was adopted, and
it affirmed the importance of the role of national heritage institutions and extending existing
systems for preservation of documentary heritage to cover digital materials. This approach has
distinct advantages, but has also been criticized for taking too narrow a view of the dynamic
diversity of the digital environment, particularly as found on the Web. It was deemed necessary
to expand further the dialogue and understand better what digital heritage is, to look at the
current preservation practices and come up with standard ethical, legal and technical guidelines,
to support the preservation of the digital heritage.
In September 2012, UNESCO, in partnership with International Federation of Library
Associations and Institutions (IFLA), International Council on Archives (ICA), and the
University of British Colombia, hosted the Memory of the World Conference in Vancouver,
Canada which resulted in the UNESCO/UBC Vancouver Declaration. The Conference explored the
key issues affecting the preservation and long-term accessibility of digital documentary heritage.
The Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO has been instrumental in launching the
PERSIST project. It has acted as a catalyst in this process by enabling and initiating collaboration
in the development of a UNESCO’s road map on digital preservation. There are many of us
working on the digital preservation issues at government ministries, in non-governmental
organisations, in the industry and in the media. Imagine the combined knowledge! Imagine the
force we can be if we use our knowledge and energy together! Collaboration leads to greater
participation and legitimacy, which in turn lead to greater involvement and interest.
It is UNESCO's duty to help to crystallize the views of its member states and formulate
appropriate policies. This is exactly the context and the direction of the draft UNESCO
Recommendation concerning the preservation of, and access to, documentary heritage in the
digital age, which invites Member States to develop policies, mechanisms and criteria for
selecting, acquiring and preserving documentary heritage of enduring value. It is expected that
the UNESCO draft Recommendation will be adopted at the 38th Session of the General
Conference in October 2015.
Attention to a more holistic approach to digital preservation is evident, as is a growing concern
about standards, planning, policies and sustainability. Policies are prerequisite for effective
digital preservation. They clearly state principles, values, and intentions, specify how the policy
is monitored and who is responsible for its maintenance, provide links to related policies, and
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indicate the process for reviewing, including frequency of review. The benefits of having a
policies about digital preservation in place include assisting with planning of a coherent digital
preservation program and publicly indicating that the organization is serious about digital
preservation.
2. India – background information to the presentation of Ms SudhaGopalakrishnan
This presentation draws on the data regarding the Government of India’s mandate on digital
policy. However, it does not solely represent the views of the Government of India, and is being
made in an individual capacity, as a person involved in some significant digital projects.
While laying out a national picture in broad terms, this presentation restricts itself to the case of
cultural resources, such as manuscripts, archival and print material, sound and video recordings,
paintings/photographs and objects from libraries, archives, museums and such collections.
India has a rich and diverse cultural heritage, with 4000 years of history (1576 languages; 4635
communities with their own cultural practices; 7 religions, countless sects; 8000 monuments
officially recognized; hundreds of culinary traditions, thousands of performing arts and crafts..)
For over a decade, India has taken up several digitisation initiatives to systematically document,
provide access and retrieval of its existing reserves of knowledge.
Some important programmes at the national level are:
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National Digital Preservation Programme (NDPP) of India http://www.ndpp.in/ was
launched by Ministry of Communications & Information Technology in 2008.
Digital Library of India (DLI) partners with the Million Book Project. It is a partnership
between institutions in India and the US including the Indian Institute of Science and the
Carnegie Mellon University to digitize around a million books pertaining to both
technical literature and art.
The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) is an Indian digital knowledge
repository of the traditional knowledge, especially about medicinal plants and
formulations used in Indian systems of medicine. Set up in 2001, as a collaboration
between the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Ministry of Health
& Family Welfare, Government of India
National Mission for Manuscripts, established in 2003, to survey, document and make
accessible the rich manuscript wealth of India
Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts has the mandate of creating synergies
between the disciplines of art and information technology leading to usage, development
and demonstration of new technology in cultural documentation. It also acts as a focal
point of digitisation of manuscripts, slides, books, audio and video to preserve the entire
repository of its present and future holdings in digital mode and to disseminate the
contents in various digital formats to the scholars, researchers and the people at large.
Since 2004, TERI has initiated an International Conference on Digital Library to bring
together experts, representatives of different national governments and scholars of
different domains in conversation with each other for exploring digital possibilities for
the future.
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In the recent past, India has launched a comprehensive programme called Digital India
“to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.” It
pulls together many existing schemes. The Mission states that
- these schemes will be restructured and re-focused;
- they will be implemented in a synchronized manner;
- many elements are only process improvements with minimal cost;
- the common branding of programmes as Digital India highlights;
- to explore and understand new ways of harnessing the digital, not merely for
documentation, but organization and networking, navigation and curation of
data as well.
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The Ministry of Culture launched a Library Mission to facilitate a comprehensive
database on digital resources on information about India and on information generated
in India, in an open access environment. It networks with 6 libraries under Ministry of
Culture, 35 State Central Libraries and 35 District Libraries with particular emphasis on
economically backward districts, as model Libraries. In addition, 629 district libraries
across the states would be provided network connectivity.
The “National Portal and Digital Repository for Museums of India” provides access to
heritage antiquities from 10 national museums under the Ministry of Culture. The
National Portal of Indian Museums integrates the digital collections of various museums
and is managed using Sanskriti Digitalaya (Open Archival Information System) and eSangrahan (Data Acquisition Tool.
National Cultural Audiovisual Archives, started in 2013 and executed by the Ministry of
Culture, Government of India, through the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts
seeks to digitize audio/video material spread across different public repositories, setting
up a virtual network and ultimately give online access to the archive.
Prasar Bharati, India’s Public Broadcaster, has a valuable wealth of heritage material
which is currently being digitized.
There are countless archives in the private domain, which need urgent attention. There are issues
pertaining to standardization, storage and upkeep, web access and dissemination which will be
dealt with during the presentation.
3. United Kingdom – background information to the presentation of Mr William
Kilbride
The leaflet on the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is contained in a separate document.
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4. The Netherlands – background information to the presentation of Mr Marcel Ras
The Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation ( NCDD)
The Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation ( NCDD),
established in 2008, is a national coalition designed to promote the preservation and the usability
of digital materials comprising the cultural and scientific heritage of The Netherlands in the long
term. This is by no means a given: computers and software evolve continuously and the internet
requires a large degree of interconnectivity. Therefore, national and international cooperation is
essential. NCDD is a platform for sharing knowledge and expertise and has a role in
coordinating and facilitating the establishment of a national network in which long term access
to digital information of the public domain is guaranteed.
NCDD is a membership organization. Members of the NCDD include: the Dutch Institute for
Sound and Vision, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek/National Library of the Netherlands, the National
Archives, Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), and a Coalition of cultural
institutions represented by the EYE Film Institute and the Digital Heritage Netherlands
Foundation (DEN). NCDD is a not-for-profit membership organization that supports its
members through advocacy, knowledge exchange, workforce development, assurance and
partnership.
The Mission of the NCDD is to establish a stable organizational and technical infrastructure to
guarantee long-term access to digital information in The Netherlands to support research,
culture and society. Its vision is to make ‘our digital memory available tomorrow’.
A NCDD survey (2009) led to a better understanding of the present status of digital preservation
in the Netherlands. According to the NCDD, problems can be best addressed by developing a
distributed national network for managing digital resources in the public sector. This
infrastructure is understood to include not just storage facilities, but a whole range of less
tangible matters: a clear definition of roles and responsibilities, selection criteria, quality criteria,
shared services, knowledge and expertise. The network should be based on collaboration
between stakeholders, because the resources required by long-term digital preservation exceed
the means of most individual institutions. (an English-language summary of the report’s
findings is available: http://www.ncdd.nl/en/documents/Englishsummary.pdf).
In 2014 NCDD started projects in which we work on the development of such a distributed
national infrastructure. The first results become available now. A roadmap for certificating of
Dutch digital repositories has been shaped, a scenario for a distributed infrastructure for
permanent access has been laid out and workflows for ingest of various types of born-digital
materials are described.
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Above all, the best result of the NCDD’s collaborative efforts is that we managed to address the
issues on a governmental level. In 2014 a national program has been shaped. Within this
program libraries, archives, museums and scientific organisations work together in the
development of a standardised cross-domain infrastructure for cultural heritage. A national
strategy published in March 2015 lays out the main principles and priorities of such an
infrastructure. The strategy must lead to infrastructure and services, which are interconnected,
standardised, shared and managed in a collaborative way. The strategy is will be worked out
along three lines: (1) making cultural heritage visible, (2) making cultural heritage usable and (3)
making cultural heritage manageable.
NCDD’s work will be continued within the third line of the national strategy. A work package
focussing on long-term management of digital heritage will be lead by NCDD in 2015 and 2016.
Projects focus on (1) building a scalable and collaborative infrastructure; (2) cost management; (3)
reshaping of roles and responsibilities in collection development in the digital era. This will be a
major challenge, but it will lead to more efficiency and effectiveness in the long-term
management of digital collections.
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