Nationellt uppdrag och internationellt samarbete ? Nationalbibliotekens bevarandemetadata för digitalt skapat material
The National Libraries task to save and preserve the national cultural heritage has turned to a new challenge in a digital world. The preservation of born-digital material for future use requires not only saving the digital object itself but also information about the object, preservation metadata. This is a relatively new issue and the library community has very little experience in this area. It has become evident that international cooperation is necessary to solve the task and that the development of international standards is of fundamental significance. This thesis investigates what has been done to meet the problems with the fast obsolescence of digital material with the focus on metadata. It examines the international collaboration in this area and the results. Ten European national libraries were inquired and their approach to long term preservation of the born-digital heritage concerning collection and strategies for handling of preservation metadata. The study shows that the Scandinavian countries began collecting with web harvesting while most countries in Central Europe work with deliveries. It is also shown that the regional differences are becoming smaller and that today most of the countries are following a combined approach. Web harvesting requires a different management of metadata than digital deliveries. However, within the different methods the solutions are rather close.