Mr Wim Van Drimmelen - Chair
Director-General, Koninklijke
Bibliotheek
The CDNL Committee on Digital Preservation was established at the CDNL meeting in Jerusalem (August 2000). It consisted of three members: Jan Fullerton (National Library of Australia), Winston Tabb (Library of Congress) and Wim van Drimmelen (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) as chair. During 2001, the committee initiated the drafting of a UNESCO Resolution on Digital Preservation and undertook the necessary measures for the adoption of the Resolution at the UNESCO Conference in Paris in October 2001.
The CDNL Task Force on Persistent Identifiers, chaired by Winston Tabb (LC), was established earlier to exchange information and to identify requirements for persistent naming from both national and global perspectives. In this context, the Helsinki University Library of Finland submitted a URN namespace registration request for National Bibliography Numbers (NBN) to the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) in 2001. The approved registration is published as RFC 3188.
At the previous annual CDNL conference meeting held in Boston, in August 2001, it was decided to merge both the CDNL Committee on Digital Preservation and the CDNL Task Force on Persistent Identifiers into one committee with a wider scope concerning digital issues.
In the past year most effort has been put into organising the new committee, its membership and network of contributing experts, and drawing up the work programme. The committee members are all taking up a leadership role in digital library developments. The work programme reflects key interest areas for national libraries and provides a common agenda on digital issues. The detailed Work Programme is attached at Appendix 1. It is anticipated that the agenda will lead to concerted action and achievements that will benefit the CDNL community as a whole.
The Committee on Digital Issues is established under the chairmanship of Wim van Drimmelen (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Netherlands).
The committee members are:
| National Library of Australia | Jan Fullerton |
| Library of Congress | Winston Tabb |
| British Library | Lynne Brindley |
| National Library of Canada | Roch Carrier |
| Helsinki University Library | Kai Ekholm |
| Die Deutsche Bibliothek | Elisabeth Niggemann |
| Koninklijke Bibliotheek | |
| Chair | Wim van Drimmelen |
| Secretary | Titia van der Werf (until June 2002);Johan Steenbakkers (July2002 - ) |
The Committee on Digital Issues was established by the Conference of Directors of National Libraries (CDNL) to promote concerted actions for the benefit of core national library tasks in the digital environment.
The committee reports about achievements and work-in-progress to the annual CDNL meeting. The annual meeting decides on termination or extension of the committee.
A 2 year work programme for 2002-2003 has been drawn up that defines, scopes and prioritises issues to be addressed by the committee. It includes the following work areas:
Documents issued by the committee are disseminated through the CDNL e-mail discussion-list. The PADI web site is used to post and disseminate documents for a wider audience.
In this work area, the adoption of the UNESCO Resolution led to the launch of a UNESCO project, entitled Preserving our Digital Heritage. Aziz Abid leads this project and commissioned Yola de Lusenet from the European Commission on Preservation and Access (ECPA) to write a discussion paper highlighting the principles for the preservation and continued accessibility of the world's ever-growing digital heritage. The paper also contains elements for a draft charter and strategy for the preservation of this heritage, which constitutes part of the "Memory of the World". The discussion paper was on the agenda of the UNESCO Executive Board meeting, May 24-28 2002. The Board recognised that the preservation of the digital heritage is an urgent issue of worldwide concern and it was decided to prepare a draft Charter for the 32nd General Conference in 2003. UNESCO will circulate a preliminary draft to Member States for broad consultation with policy-makers, professional communities concerned and the private sector, requesting their comments and suggestions before January 2003. A revised draft charter will be submitted to the 166th session of the Executive Board. It will then be transmitted to the General Conference for consideration and adoption at the end of 2003.
The Committee on digital issues was established by the Conference of Directors of National Libraries (CDNL) to promote concerted actions for the benefit of core national library tasks in the digital environment.
The Committee was established in August 2001, as a merger of two existing CDNL working groups:
The name given to the Committee on digital issues is suitably vague and neutral to encompass all digital library issues - but the Committee has expressed the need to define and scope its own work programme and to prioritise the issues it wants to tackle.
It is proposed to start with a 2-year work programme that will address the following three issues:
The names of experts assigned up to now are:
| Koninklijke Bibliotheek | Johan Steenbakkers Gerard van Trier |
| National Library of Australia | Pamela Gatenby |
| Library of Congress | Sally McCallum |
| British Library | Helen Shenton Deborah Woodyard |
| Die Deutsche Bibliothek | Ute Schwens Hans Liegmann Kathrin Schröder |
| National Library of Canada | Fay Hjartarson Alison Bullock Bill Newman Marg Stewart Ingrid Parent Libby Martin |
| Helsinki University Library | Marit Olander Jani Stenvall Marko Tenkanen Jukka Kervinen |
| WORK PROGRAMME AREA | ACTIVITIES | RESULTS | TIMEFRAME | ORIGIN | GOAL |
| Digital Preservation | UNESCO Resolution | UNESCO Resolution adopted | October 2000 - October 2001 | NEDLIB project | awareness raising |
| Johan Steenbakkers (KB) | Contribute to UNESCO Memory of the World Project: Preserving our digital heritage. | UNESCO Charter | 2002-2003 | NEDLIB project | promote collaborative research |
| Research & Standardisation | Section on Digital Preservation Research in the PADI web site | August 2001 - August 2002 | |||
| International Collaborative Research Initiative | 2002 - 2003 | ||||
| Persistent Identifiers Sally McCallum (LC) |
overview of current practices and tools | Section on Persistent Identifiers in the PADI web site | August 2001 -August 2002 | CDNL Task Force on PI | promote common solutions |
| Deposit Agreements Pamela Gatenby (NLA) |
promote adoption of the CENL/FEP codes of practice at the int'l level | CDNL/IPA Statement on deposit code of practice | 2002-2003 | new | promote common understanding |
| overview of deposit agreements concerning digital material | Section on Deposit Agreements in the PADI web site | August 2001 -August 2002 | new | best practices |
The common interests of national libraries delimit the scope of the work programme. Each work programme area relates to a core task of national libraries.
The secretary of the Committee will write up a yearly report about the Committee's work and achievements, to be submitted to the annual CDNL meeting.