[LINK] Legal Deposit laws

[Margaret Phillips]

Stephen's is an interesting point to ponder about web page's being like
signs, rather than publications.  He wrote:

>One point, perhaps webpages are more analogous to 'signs'
rather than 'publications' however?  After all, who makes the
copies? Signwriters make one copy and mount it somewhere
whilst traditional publishers make multiple copies to distribute.
Imho pages are like bill-boards on the digital superhighway :-)

The analogy works only up to a point for me.  Signs don't carry as much
information as a web page often does and the information in a sign
doesn't change or get added to as fast as happens with web pages.  A
high proportion of signs are commerical/promotional/advertising/
ephemeral in nature, and certainly a lot of web pages are too.  However,
there are many many web pages that have a much greater and richer
variety of information on them that is of long term value.

In selecting items for archiving NLA looks at the content rather than
format or how it is presented.

Best wishes

Margaret

Margaret E Phillips
Director Digital Archiving
National Library of Australia
email: mphillips at nla.gov.au
phone: + 61 2 6262 1140
fax: + 61 2 6273 4322