Digital Preservation Coalition

National Library of Wales

Excerpt from DPC Annual Report 2008-9

The NLW is currently implementing its Digital Preservation Policy and Strategy. One of the aims of the strategy is to ensurethat digitisation projects undertaken by the NLW have preservation plans, which will provide sufficient information to ensure the preservation and sustainability of the digital resources. The first project to create a plan has been the Wales Journals Online project,the aim of which is to provide users with free online, searchable, access to a selection of 19th-21st century Welsh and Wales related journals held by the Library and its partner institutions. The material ranges from academic and scholarly journals to current affairs and popular magazines, reflecting all aspects of Welsh life. Partners in the project include JISC and the Welsh Assembly Government.

The preservation plan is structured following the OAIS model, and includes information regarding roles and responsibilities, the creation and content of SIPS, AIPS and DIPS, information about rights, file formats and migration plans. It records that high-resolution TIFF files in greyscale for archiving and low resolution JPEGS for web presentation were generated and that scans were run through an OCR process to generate a TEI text file to facilitate word searching of the entire content. METS documents were created upon ingest into Vital, the NLW’s digital asset management system. A detailed record of each article was prepared in the main catalogue, which then forms part of the metadata within the METS document in order to present the material online. The Library is committed to continuing to upload current or semi-issues of ongoing periodicals, and the clarification of corporate commitments to maintain and enhance the resource, and the need to include tasking for this in future operationalplans, has proved very useful.