[LINK] FW: ICT Predictions 2009 - little OT (gov't reports example)

Paul Koerbin pkoerbin at nla.gov.au
Mon Jan 19 14:34:23 AEDT 2009


Anthony

Regarding your comment (below), I am the Manger of Web Archiving (PANDORA) at the NLA and I have not received your message. Who did you send it to?

Anyway to answer the question, Commonwealth Government reports are certainly in scope and a priority for including in PANDORA, particularly if they are only in electronic format. But even important ones that are in print as well will often get included in PANDORA, especially since the online version includes additional things like submissions and so on. That said, assume nothing! PANDORA is selective and runs on bare bones resources and depends upon us identifying the materials or being notified of the materials (which is rare). What does not get picked up in the selection process for PANDORA might get picked up in our annual domain harvests but that content is not currently made available.

Regarding the cataloguing, we catalogue all "titles" selected for PANDORA and when a title is catalogued the record includes two URLs, one pointing to the live/publisher site and the other is a persistent URL for the archived version in PANDORA. It is important to understand what a "title" is in PANDORA however. At "title" is what the web curator selects, which may be just the specific report (in which case the report would be catalogued under its title) but if the report is archived as part of a larger "title" selected for archiving (e.g. the reports section of a departmental website) then the individual title would not be catalogued. You would need to use the PANDORA search engine to find such a report (always a good idea anyway).

One other thing to bear in mind regarding PANDORA is that state government publications are the responsibility of the State Library PANDORA partners - that is, they select what they archive; it is not centrally directed by the NLA. In all cases the state libraries' resources for PANDORA are even more scant than the NLAs which has implications for the amount done and it will vary significantly between states. NSW for example gives a high priority to government publications because they have their "premiers directive" to work with.

Hope this clarifies things.

Paul

Paul Koerbin
Manager Web Archiving
National Library of Australia




> I assumed that NLA would keep electronic copies of government reports,
> especially if there are no paper copies.

Don't know where or if this is consistently done. I sent an email asking about if these reports are archived via PANDORA or something else and haven't received a reply yet. Will try again (appreciate any leads here). The NLA definitely tracks the new government reports on the web via catalogue records and you can subscribe to the RSS feed to get all the new ones the NLA finds delivered direct to you (and this as all NLA services is great & I thank them for it). My comment to NLA was that if they were archiving them somewhere then they should include two URLs in their catalogue record. One to the original (that will definitely break at some point) and one to their archived version (that should be more permanent).





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