Digital Deposit

The first phase of this project began 1 May 2005. Phase two started in April 2006 and finished by 30 November 2006.

Collecting digital resources (e-books etc.) requires an infrastructure different from the one we have for traditional print materials. Our experiences over the past years have told us where the difficulties lie. New technical solutions have been developed to meet these challenges and needs.

The aim of this project has been to further develop those technical solutions and, moreover, attempt to find practical solutions to problems we have yet to solve.

Activities

This project covers a wide range of activities involving collecting as well as cataloging, archiving, and access.

This new infrastructure for the digital deposit must chiefly be based on metadata. An additional important task for the project will, therefore, be to find out how to acquire metadata together with digital deposits.

Background

Swedish legal deposit legislation does not yet cover online publications, although the government has announced that a new Act will come in to force in July 2007.

While waiting for this new Legal Deposit Act the Swedish National Library has taken several steps forward. In 1997 the Kulturarw3 Project started to harvest the Swedish part of the web and has continued to do so a couple of times a year. Since 2000 the National Library has come to agreements with Swedish book publishers, universities and organizations about delivering full text versions of new e-resources together with bibliographic information. As a service in return catalogue records are quickly made available in LIBRIS – the National Union Catalog.

In order to handle this flow of text files and metadata new technical solutions has been developed and a workflow which we have established in collaboration with Uppsala University Library. This project, Digital Deposit at the Swedish National Library, aims at further develop these first steps.