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Creation is the act of producing the information product. The producer may be a human author or originator, or a piece of equipment such as a sensing device, laboratory instrument or satellite. Creation is viewed here in the broadest sense, as increasingly science is based on a variety of data types, products and originators.
Acquisition and collection development is the stage in which the created object is "incorporated" physically or virtually into the archive. The object must be known to the archive administration. There are two main aspects to the acquisition of digital objects: collection policies and gathering procedures.
Both the National Library of Australia and the National Library of Canada acknowledge the importance of selection guidelines. The guidelines of the first library state, "The main difficulty in extending legal deposit to network publishing is that legal deposit is a relatively indiscriminate acquisition mechanism that aims at comprehensiveness. In the network environment, any individual with access to the Internet can be a publisher, and the network publishing process does not always provide the initial screening and selection at the manuscript stage on which libraries have traditionally relied in the print environment… Selection policies are, therefore, needed to ensure the collection of publications of lasting cultural and research value."
The extensive use of hypertext links to other digital objects in electronic publications raises the question of whether these links and their content should be archived along with the source item. This issue has been addressed by the selected projects in a variety of ways.
Most organizations archive the links (the URLs
or other identifiers) but not the content of the linked objects. The American
Institute of Physics archives the links embedded in the text and references of
its electronic journal articles but not the text or content of any of these
links, unless the linked item happens to be in its publication archive or in the
supplemental material which it also archives. Similarly, the Office of
Scientific and Technical Information of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE OSTI)
does not intentionally archive any links beyond the extent of the digital object
itself. However, the document may be linked to another document if that document
is another DOE document in the OSTI archive. NLA’s decision about archiving the
content of linked objects is based on its selection guidelines. If a linked item
meets the selection guidelines, it’s
contents will be archived, otherwise it will not be
Feedback on this article about digital archiving, mail to digital-archive
For a page in Dutch language about archiving click here.
20-05-2008
Fleetmanagement / document management systems / digitaal archiveren