The National Library of Norway is facing several challenges to avoid a future digital dark age.
There is more to the National Library of Norway than just books. The institution defines itself as a living recollection of the Norwegian written, spoken and visual heritage. This means that every single published newspaper, periodical, radio and TV programme, photo, map, webpage, piece of music and film is a part of the vast library collection, making this one of the first truly multimedia libraries in the world.
Although some of this material is produced in a digital format, the library has undertaken an immense digitisation process to become a fully digitised library. Even for a small nation like Norway, this entails the digitisation and storage of 60 million newspaper pages, 90 million book pages, one million hours of radio broadcasts, 250,000 hours of TV and film and 4 million manuscripts – to mention only a few figures.
Looking at the 1,000 years’ perspective for storage and retrieval, the library is facing several challenges to avoid a future digital dark age. As a partner in the LongRec project, the National Library is seeking to develop a minimum set of requirements for the procedures and digital formats used in order to ensure sustainability and no loss of information. “For us it is also important that we use formats which are easy to convert to future standards,” says national librarian Vigdis Moe Skarstein.
Eight terabytes added daily
Every day, eight terabytes of digitised information are added to the library’s database, which today consists of three well-protected storage units, each containing three petabytes. “Migrating this huge amount of data from one standard to another will in itself be a huge challenge,” says Ms Skarstein.
Another focus area for the National Library is the development of future-proof search and retrieval processes by adding meaningful metadata. In this context the library is concerned about the fact that the meaning of certain words changes over time. There is also an issue about how to date certain types of information to ensure the most relevant search results. For example, how do we label a picture taken in 1960 of a church dating from the 14th century?
What differentiates the National Library from other partners in the LongRec project is that the documents must also be available to the public. “This means that all the records are stored in both a preservation format and a distribution format,” says Ms Skarstein.
This systematic approach to the digitisation of a whole national library places Norway, together with France, the Netherlands and the UK, at the forefront in the efforts to create a modern multimedia library. Participation in the LongRec project will further ensure the success of these efforts.
Date: 2008-06-13