The digital dark age? Bevarande av elektroniskt material i Sverige
ArkiveringDigitalt bevarandeElektroniskt materialDocumentationInformationLibrary scienceArchivisticsArkiv- och bibliotekskunskapDokumentationSocial Sciences
The first law in Sweden containing an act of legal deposit is from 1661. Since then the printing-houses are supposed to deliver all printed material to the Royal Library and other recipient libraries. Today, more and more information is solely published electronically. This material is not yet included in the law of legal deposit. In a similar way as our printed cultural heritage is saved for posterity our electronic cultural heritage has to be saved. If it s not saved the information will be lost forever. 1991 librarian Jan T. Jasion identified four requirements for legal deposit: exhaustiveness, preservation, information and access, which should be met if the purpose of legal deposit is to preserve the nation s cultural heritage. In this Master s thesis we investigate if these four requirements also can be applied on preservation of electronic material. We discuss if, in Sweden, the same demands have been put on the preservation of electronic material as on the preservation of printed and if it is possible to secure the electronic cultural heritage in a similar way as the printed. For this purpose we have studied three documents: two government official reports, SOU 1992:92 and SOU 1998:111, and documents concerning the Royal Library s webarchiving project called, Kulturarw3. Our conclusion is that the preservation of electronic material in Sweden does not meet Jasions four requirements. In our opinion a higher compliance to Jaison s requirements is desirable. All information ought to be preserved for coming generations and there should be no difference in which forms the information is published. It would be preferable if the same requirements could be set for electronic material as for printed. However, this is not yet possible because of technical and legal obstacles. A law of legal deposit that includes preservation of electronic material, is necessary as a first step to develop systems that will overcome the technical obstacles.