Mr ANDREW: I would like to extend my greatest thanks to all of the staff for all of the support you give to us here, so thank you for that. Mr Clerk or Mr Speaker, page 1 of the SOS refers to the Parliamentary Service’s digital strategy plan, which I presume includes the Library’s digital preservation project. Can you please provide an update on this project and whether the Library intends to make its extensive online historical archive of books and other documents freely accessible to the public, along the lines of the National Library’s Trove collection.

Mr Laurie: First of all, in terms of digital strategy overall it is the objective of the Library to have as many of its holdings transformed into digital holdings. For example, during the course of the current year we had a storage of ministerial press releases going back to the early 1990s-or it might have been the 1970s, now that I think about it-which we understand were the only repositories of those sorts of things that are really important for historic reasons in terms of understanding policy. We took those hard copies and digitised them as a way of preserving them. We are very keen on doing that; however, we have to also realise that we are the custodians of records that are not unique to parliament. There may be, for example, collections like regional newspapers we hold in some form like microfiche, but the issue is determining whether we are the appropriate organisation spending funds on digitising them or whether somebody else is like the State Library. We have to recognise the collaborative nature of digital preservation. Our strategy emphasises the importance of establishing partnerships between the custodians of the parliament’s collections and information management and technology teams. I will outline some key actions in the strategy which is being implemented.

We established an internal digital preservation community practice to facilitate knowledge sharing across the organisation. We transitioned to sustainable file formats that offer the highest probability of ensuring content. For example, some digital items that are in video may not be in a format that are usable now; they are only usable at a point in time. We defined a minimum standard of metadata to enhance discoverability, and we conduct annual assessments of digital collection risks, focusing on factors such as volume, growth, trans file formats and technical dependencies.

I should add that there are some issues around copyright that we obviously have to be very mindful of. Not all of our collection that is in digital format can be shared beyond our members because there are copyright issues. That is an impediment to us making it publicly available. I am more than happy to look at it in more detail if there is anything in particular.