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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
The UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage, adopted in October 2003, is important for affirming 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. To understand what digital heritage is, it is useful to look at the current debate on preservation of intangible heritage, as both share a number of characteristics. The charter is examined in the context of UNESCO programs on culture to indicate its relevance for UNESCO's mission and to point to political aspects of digital preservation that cannot be ignored.
BRIEF HISTORY
On October 17, 2003, the thirty-second session of the General Conference of UNESCO adopted a Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage, a milestone in a process that had started several years earlier and that continues to this day. The charter is one of the UNESCO activities for safeguarding the documentary heritage and is closely connected to the Memory of the World Programme, which aims to preserve and promote cultural heritage through digitization projects, the publication of guidelines, and the Memory of the World Register of well over a hundred works of exceptional importance.
The UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage was a response to the concern voiced by memory institutions that digital materials (primarily those digitally born) will become inaccessible in the near future unless widespread and structural measures are taken to guarantee continued access. It is significant that the Conference of Directors of National Libraries was involved in the very first stages, and that the European Commission on Preservation and Access, which promotes the preservation of collections in libraries and archives, prepared a paper to open the discussion in early 2002. This was followed by a draft text for the charter that was reviewed during the phase of consultation taking place in 2002 and 2003. The consultation included extensive discussion of the draft guidelines for digital heritage written for UNESCO by the National Library of Australia (2003). The latter text, a substantial document of 170 pages, presents general and technical guidelines for professionals responsible for safeguarding access to digital materials, and is intended as a companion volume to the charter.
Both documents were discussed at regional meetings in 2002 and 2003 (for Central Europe, the Baltic region, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, and Africa), which were attended by some 175 experts from 86 countries (National Library of Australia, 2003, p. 7). Once the charter had been adopted, several workshops on digitization and digital heritage took place, most recently in Ethiopia in August 2006. This workshop was one of three--the others will be organized in Botswana and South Africa--to support regional implementation of the charter and the guidelines.
TEXT OF THE CHARTER
The charter (UNESCO, 2003a) begins with a broad definition of digital heritage as embracing "cultural, educational, scientific and administrative resources, as well as technical, medical and other kinds of information created digitally, or converted into digital form from existing analogue resources" and to include "texts, databases, still and moving images, audio, graphics, software and web pages" (Article 1). The text points to the variety of factors that endanger the life of digital materials; not only obsolescence of hardware and software, but also uncertainties about resources, responsibilities, and methods for maintenance and preservation, and the lack of supportive legislation (Article 3). The emphasis is on attitudinal change, which "has fallen behind technological change" (Article 3), on advocacy, policies, and legal frameworks. Thus the intent of the document is to emphasize that more will be needed than referring the matter to professionals who can provide technical solutions. As it aims to outline the principles of digital preservation, the text is general, leaving room for further specifications during implementation.
The document reflects priorities articulated by memory institutions, which have long been aware of the problem and have been working on models, technological strategies (emulation, migration), preservation metadata, storage, the requirements for trusted digital repositories, etc. However, in order for them to be able to move forward, major legislative and organizational issues need to be resolved at the governmental level. The charter, as a standard-setting instrument, concisely presents principles in order to encourage member states to undertake the necessary action. Archive legislation and (legal) deposit are mentioned as key elements of a national preservation policy. The charter emphasizes the need for selection criteria on the basis of "significance and lasting cultural, scientific, evidential or other value" (Article 7) as well as for guarantees to ensure authenticity. It refers to the need for coordination and sharing of tasks and responsibilities, possibly "based on existing roles and expertise" (Article 10).
For publicly funded heritage institutions, it is important that their governments recognize and support the institutions' responsibilities. In most countries, national heritage institutions, unlike research libraries for instance, fall directly under the authority of a Minister of Culture and often cannot on their own initiative set priorities or allocate resources to specific programs. Official recognition of responsibility is therefore a condition for further activities, and it also enables institutions to assume national leadership. Governmental support is essential because the guidance they would be expected to give may well affect the organization and work processes within other institutions. As digital preservation needs to be considered throughout the information life cycle, producers of information preferably would have to comply with certain requirements, to ensure that access to materials can be guaranteed when they move into the care of a heritage institution. As stated in Article 5 of the charter, digital preservation "begins with the design of reliable systems and procedures which will produce authentic and stable digital objects." For instance, national archiving bodies cannot passively wait until digital records that are created today are transferred to them twenty or thirty years from now, but will have to be involved in the design of information systems for record-creating agencies. This may involve redrafting procedures or reshuffling formal tasks and can only be brought about when an archival institution can act from a strong position with government support.
The text of the charter only refers to legal frameworks in a general sense and steers clear of any specific suggestion that preservation of digital heritage requires changes in copyright regulations. Whenever rights are mentioned, the right to access is carefully balanced against the rights of owners. There is no explicit recommendation to widen copyright regulations so as to allow copying of digital materials for preservation purposes, which would have been an important addition for heritage institutions. This was no doubt a strategic choice; mentioning a sensitive issue like copyright carries the risk that it will dominate the discussion on the political level, taking away interest from the core of the text and ultimately blocking adoption. From UNESCO's point of view, there are other platforms where copyright issues should be resolved.
From the many references to issues relating to national responsibilities it is clear the charter builds on existing systems for preservation, which have been developed on the principle that each country should take care of its own heritage. The approach toward the new challenge of digital preservation is pragmatic in that it uses the lines drawn in more or less familiar territory and extends them to as yet uncharted terrain. A concrete example of the same strategy is the revision of the deposit regulations, which has been undertaken in many countries, to include all published materials irrespective of the carrier on which they are published. (1)
DIFFERENT VIEWS OF DIGITAL HERITAGE
In November 2005 the Netherlands National Committee for UNESCO and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands, organized a conference "Preserving Digital Heritage: Principles and Policies" as a follow-up activity...
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