National Library News

December 1995, vol. 27, no. 12

Electronic Publications Pilot Project Completed

by Iris Winston, Staff Writer

The National Library of Canada's one-year Electronic Publications Pilot Project (EPPP) was completed in July. A response to the explosion in electronic publishing and networked information and its impact on Canada's published heri-tage and the National Library's work in maintaining that heritage, the EPPP was initiated to consider the major issues in processing and providing access to online publications (see “The National Library's Electronic Publications Pilot Project” and “Resource Sharing and Information Technology: Updates”, National Library News, vol. 27, nos. 3-4, April 1995, pp. 1, 4-5, and no. 6, June 1995, pp. 19-20).

The formal objectives of the project, which involved 46 online publications, were:

To identify and understand the issues that libraries in general and the National Library of Canada in particular will encounter in handling online collections.
To foster knowledge about and familiarity with online documents in National Library of Canada operational staff (i.e., those involved in selection, acquisitions, cataloguing, collection management, transfer of online documents to preservation storage media, reference and public service).
To help the National Library of Can-ada to develop long-term policies on dealing with networked documents, and to recommend organizational responsibilities for handling these documents.
To gain experience so that the National Library can continue to be effective within the federal government in the management of published government information in an electronic environment.
To provide input to National Library of Canada requirements definitions and planning documents.
To gain experience and expertise in some of the technologies and technology issues fundamental to electronic publications and electronic publishing, in particular, electronic publishing on the Internet.

The major issues confronted were:

All aspects of copyright and access.
Maintaining the integrity of electronic publications.
Establishing standards for electronic publications.
Handling electronic publications.
Applying legal deposit to electronic publications.
The security and preservation of electronic publications.
Ensuring continuing access to electronic publications.

When the final report on the project was presented to the National Librarian in November, it had achieved its major objectives of highlighting key issues and familiarizing staff in different areas of the Library with handling electronic publications.

“We are continuing to build our collection of electronic publications and to devise stronger systems support for that collection,” says project member Nancy Brodie. “There's still a lot of planning to do. We expect more and more people to publish electronically and to use the Internet as a dissemination vehicle. Therefore, it is important for us to mainstream the handling of electronic publications as soon as possible. Our approach will be to manage electronic publications through our new bibliographic system, but we need a more robust infrastructure before proceeding too quickly.”

Many other issues remain in need of resolution, she says, particularly:

Balancing universal access to the electronic publications with the rights of publishers.
Maintaining the integrity of electronic documents, which can be corrupted far more readily than print publications.
Preserving electronic publications and ensuring that they remain readable in the future despite constant changes in the electronic environment and hardware.

“The EPPP is, so to speak, a toe in the water of a rapidly expanding pool,” says Brodie. “We have learned a tremendous amount in terms of who is publishing electronically, how it is being done, details of the acquisition process, and possible restraints and options in the whole area of commercial electronic publishing and copyright. Our preliminary findings indicate that it is not difficult to store or preserve electronic publications in the short term. We must now turn our attention to long-term preservation and the need to develop a cooperative national preservation strategy for electronic documents. We must also address the matter of cost. We know it is expensive to acquire publications in different formats, and there can be difficulties in transferring files automatically.”

The increasing emphasis on technology and electronic publications and their impact on libraries everywhere made the EPPP essential. Its greatest value has been in highlighting the number and complexity of the issues surrounding electronic publishing and in adapting the methods for handling traditional print formats to a changing electronic environment.

Information:

Nancy Brodie
Information Resource Management
National Library of Canada
395 Wellington Street
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0N4
Telephone: (613) 947-5887
Fax: (613) 996-7941
TTY: (613) 992-6969
Internet: nancy.brodie@nlc-bnc.ca