Titia van der Werf-Davelaar introduces NEDLIB: Networked European Deposit Library.
Within the broader context of preserving the national cultural heritage, deposit libraries are tasked to ensure that published material, whether in written, printed or electronic form, is preserved for use now and in the future.
Whilst the deposit process for printed publications is well established, this is not the case for electronic publications. Since 1995, deposit libraries are addressing this new challenge and they do so increasingly in collaboration, under the umbrella of the Conference of European National Libraries (CENL) and the Conference of Directors of National Libraries (CDNL). Jointly on an international level and individually on a national level, they are tackling a whole range of issues including, reaching agreements with publishers, establishing legal frameworks, meeting end-user access requirements, re-designing workflow processes and developing the necessary digital infrastructure to support this workflow.
NEDLIB was initiated by CoBRA+, a permanent Standing Committee of CENL [1]. The project was launched on January 1, 1998, with funding from the European Commission's Telematics Application Programme, and runs till the end of 2000. Eight national libraries in Europe, one national archive, two ICT organisations and three major publishers are participating in the project. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, leads the project.
NEDLIB, which stands for Networked European Deposit Library, addresses major technical issues confronting national deposit libraries that are in the process of extending their deposit to digital works. The project aims to develop a common architectural framework and basic tools for building deposit systems for electronic publications (DSEP) [2]
The NEDLIB project is reporting regularly to the CENL and CoBRA+ meetings in order to assure feedback on work-in-progress and to address issues arising from this concertation. This proves to be very effective and the relevance of NEDLIB achievements to national libraries has increased because of this.
One important piece of work carried out by the project is the functional specification and overall design of a DSEP. The main objective is to identify functional requirements that are common to all deposit libraries in order to arrive at a "generic" high-level design of a DSEP that can serve as a basis for local implementations by individual deposit libraries.
A common workflow for handling deposited electronic publications was defined and helped to identify common functional requirements. A major step forward in the conceptual design of a DSEP was made in December 1998, when the project consortium agreed to adopt the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model as a Reference Model [3]. During 1999 a DSEP process model and data flow, based on the OAIS model, has been developed. It is tailored to fit within the broader framework of deposit libraries systems.
In the DSEP model the functions of a deposit system are linked into the digital library environment. Much of the OAIS functionality, such as submission (acquisition), description (cataloguing), creating finding aids (the National Bibliography, the library OPAC, subject guides and other indexes), and providing access, is part of the broader digital library configuration. In other words, OAIS functionality bundled in entities such as Ingest, Data Management and Access overlaps the general functionality of a digital library system (DLS). Consequently, the OAIS functionality is situated partly outside and partly inside the actual limits of a DSEP and in the DSEP model the Ingest, Data-Management and Access modules have much more limited functionality than they have in the OAIS Reference Model. Additionally, the NEDLIB model defines how the DSEP system and the digital library system (DLS) interact. Two interfacing modules have been specified through which all input and output interactions with the DSEP take place. Figure 1 shows the result of this scoping exercise.
For a discussion of the DSEP-model please refer to an article on NEDLIB published in the September issue of D-Lib Magazine [4].
 Figure 1: High-level design of a Deposit System for Electronic Publications (DSEP) |
The DSEP model can serve as a starting point for system design. It emphasises ways of building an extensible system whose modules can easily be evolved or replaced. It provides a high-level design of a prototype deposit system that can provide for the preservation of digital publications. The design still needs to be underpinned with architectural guidelines and translated into an appropriate implementation design. This needs to be done at the local level, by deposit libraries individually, taking account of their local requirements and evolving DLS infrastructures. But the DSEP model is a very good starting point for deposit libraries that are in the process of building such a system. In fact the DSEP model already serves this purpose as increasing numbers of deposit libraries are tendering for such systems and involving the ICT-industry in the process. These libraries have all consulted the DSEP model developed by NEDLIB and it has helped them in their specification of requirements to vendors. The libraries concerned include the Koninklijke Bibliotheek who is tendering for a Deposit System for Dutch Electronic Publications [5], the British Library who, likewise, started a European tender for the procurement of a Digital Library System in 1999 [6] and the National Library of Australia who has undertaken several procurement exercises in the past year, based on digital services requirements documented in their Information Paper [7].
In all cases these libraries are not aiming at turnkey solutions. They want to base the overall system on products and services available or currently becoming available in the marketplace. With this strategy they hope to minimise future systems development and operations costs, taking advantage of market-driven technology improvement. At the same time they realise the disadvantage of commercial solutions that follow short-cyclic and market-driven product development paths and that do not outlive the lifetime of the commercial enterprise who designed the product. The libraries therefore intend to implement this strategy by:
NEDLIB hopes to support this strategy by providing guidelines for technical standards and conventions, scorecards for testing the functionality of tools and better insight in the technicalities of long-term preservation.
The NEDLIB standards document is still in development. It takes the list of OAIS-related standards as a starting point and describes standards and conventions that are relevant for a DSEP. The OAIS standardisation efforts are progressing. At an archival workshop on Ingest, Identification and certification standards (AWIICS) that took place in October 1999, three working groups have been installed to look at standards. NEDLIB is also looking at Ingest and Identification and intends to provide feedback to the AWIICS working groups.
Concerning standards for the submission of electronic publications to the DSEP, deposit libraries need to establish digital deposit procedures with publishers, such as file transfer via FTP, harvesting from the web, postal delivery of off-line publications, etc. These procedures should be based on agreements about access permissions, submission schedules, submission package formats. A submission package typically consists of the electronic publication itself and all sorts of additional files, including installation files, structural metadata providing some indication of the way in which the files are inter-related and organised. Some packages may carry just one dissertation, but others may carry several journal issues or even a snap-shot of an Internet domain.
The issue of standardisation of submission is not one of trying to influence the publishing industry to standardise publishing formats, although from a preservation point of view it is arguable that resources created in certain formats will be easier to preserve than others. Deposit libraries will receive publications in the format they were published in. "Standardisation" in this area is dictated by the market-place. However, deposit libraries can make agreements with publishers concerning the submission package. By defining a generic package format it will be possible to process incoming data from a great variety of publishers in a similar way, making the whole ingest process more scalable.
In other areas, standards such as Z39.50 for searching and HTTP/FTP for delivery, are already in use in Digital Library Systems. DSEP does not require specific standards for search and retrieve, but the related standards and techniques for identifying a digital object and resolving the identifier to its location in a library DSEP-system are crucial. The long-term identification, resolution and access to deposited (networked) electronic publications are issues of major concern to deposit libraries [8]. NEDLIB partners, together with other national library experts, are discussing these issues in a CDNL-working-group on permanent naming. Among the CDNL approved principles, the most challenging and far-reaching one is "that memory organisations (such as national libraries) have a responsibility to provide last-resort resolution services for identifiers of cultural heritage resources."
NEDLIB hopes to provide practical guidance to help deposit libraries adhere to this principle: if not direct solutions, at least an extensible list of problems that need to be addressed, such as the necessity to establish rules for usage of identifiers when documents are "processed" for long-time preservation purposes.
Metadata is another area for standards, but again there is much overlap with the broader digital library metadata requirements. NEDLIB does not look into standards for the bibliographic description of electronic publications, which are being developed by established standardisation committees and related projects. NEDLIB addresses metadata in several ways:
NEDLIB is in the process of building a demonstrator system, with tools and software already in use by project partners or developed by NEDLIB, covering all functional aspects of a DSEP. Software and tools are being developed, tested and integrated in functional building blocks of the demonstrator. Existing library systems, such as the online public access catalogue (OPAC) and the library acquisition and cataloguing systems, which are external to, but need to interact with a DSEP, will interface to the demonstrator. During the demonstration stage, which is scheduled for the second half of 2000, the handling of electronic publications from acquisition to access will be demonstrated, with sample material provided by Elsevier Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers and Springer-Verlag.
Titia van der Werf-Davelaar
Koninklijke Bibliotheek
National Library of the Netherlands
Email: titia@python.konbib.nl
For citation purposes:
van der Werf-Davelaar, T.,"NEDLIB: Networked European Deposit Library", Exploit Interactive issue 4, January 2000
<URL: http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue4/nedlib/>
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