The Kildare Street library is expanding its online footprint and giving equal weight to archiving material that comes in bits and bytes, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

FOR 135 YEARS, saving paper has been its focus. But with so much of the world’s written content and images increasingly in digital form, the National Library of Ireland has embarked on a major project to digitise its collections and give equal weight to archiving new material that comes in bits and bytes.

An ambitious four programmes of work were launched during the past year, approaching the digitisation task from a range of directions. One effort is directed at digitising the library’s catalogues, as under 60 per cent its printed catalogue of books and periodicals is available online.

A second, the Digitisation programme, aims to convert some of the library’s printed material into digital – and therefore more widely accessible – versions.

The Born Digital programme is focusing on making materials that are relevant to Irish citizens available online, while the Oscail programme is the technical aspect – making sure the hardware and software is there to support the entire digitisation effort.

“2010 is when it all kicked off in a general way. The new director of the library and the board has taken a very clear focus on the need to do this. And we’re all very conscious that these are new skills that need to be developed,” says Della Murphy, programme director of the Born Digital project.

One of the first results available to the public is the library’s online digital archive of the last general election, to be followed soon this year by an archive of the recent presidential election.

Web users can take a trip down election memory lane by visiting the library’s archived party websites, election pamphlets, blog posts and discussions, and other websites related to the election.

“We archived maybe 96 websites from the general election. Just scoping the project was a huge effort,” Murphy says.

The presidential election will incorporate about 80 websites. Both projects have been extremely useful as pilots to help library staff get a sense of what is involved in taking such material in, deciding on the ways in which it will be stored and then presented to the public in an organised manner.

But Murphy also stresses that creating such a collection is not a dramatic deviation from what the library already does. After all, she says, what is different is simply the format – the internet as the publication method for the material. “We want to build on what we already have. For example, we already collect lots of paper-based ephemera from elections, and the collection is just an extension of that.” And her colleague Jennifer Doyle, programme co-ordinator for the Oscail project, adds, “Digital isn’t any different for us.”

Indeed, the library had already been quietly creating a footprint online, before defining such work into specific programmes. The library has an energetic Twitter presence (@NLIIreland), a Facebook page, and many digitised photo collections up on Flickr.

Users have helped to identify some of the pictures, and have also been able to provide the context for photos, a “crowd sourcing” benefit and relationship with the public that Doyle and Murphy would like to further encourage and develop.

Of course, they’d like to do a lot of things. The question is where to begin, and what to take on?

“The big challenge in the digital world is volume. How to go through all of these sources and materials? However, we have a very specific mandate in what we collect – material that is published or relates to Ireland,” says Murphy. But they are receiving less material than they would like. Here, as in many other countries, the library is caught in a gap between the fast growth in digital publication and the law.

The National Library of Ireland is one of the State’s copyright libraries and is legally entitled to a copy of everything published in Ireland. “But our problem is that relates to printed material only,” says Murphy. They hope in future that the definition of “publication”, and the scope of copyright in promised updates to Irish copyright law, will be changed so that libraries also receive copies of digital publications.

MEANWHILE, THEY are working with the Government this year to get Government publications – many of them internal, and therefore not formally preserved in any way – archived in digital form, under the aegis of the Born Digital programme. This, says Murphy, will also provide a good pilot scheme to help the library establish workflow procedures around taking in and digitising large volumes of material.

Another major project for 2012 is the library’s digital repository, where it will store all of its digital “objects” – which may be documents, webpages, sound files, images or anything in digital format.

“The big question right now that we’re working on is how to display it. It’s really all about the collections. Everything we do is based around the collections,” says Doyle. There could be thousands of objects eventually associated with the library’s precious Yeats collection – the task is to select how those objects might be presented either in catalogue form or in a curated online archive.

Lying behind all such determinations is the very basic problem of formats and standards, concerns which are global for modern-day librarians and archivists. With technical standards and storage media changing rapidly, how best to save a digital object?

“We have vellum manuscripts from the 1500s that you can still take down and read,” says Murphy. Yet, adds Doyle, the library also has collections on floppy disks and magnetic tape that are close to reaching the end of their digital lifespan and need to be moved to new, more accessible formats. “Because part of our remit is long-term access, we always have to be future-proofing,” says Murphy.

In common with most libraries, the national library uses open-source-based systems and standards to control costs and prevent formats from vanishing due to companies going out of business.

Libraries are already facing curious new archive challenges. For example, the writer Salman Rushdie donated his computers and their contents to Emory University in the US, says Murphy.

They provide an insight into how he worked, captured in his computer files, but the university has to understand how to archive the computer as an object as well as all the associated files. With collections from Irish writers forming an integral part of the collections, Murphy has no doubt that they will face similar archive issues.

An even more fundamental question relates to the importance the Government decides to place on archiving Irish social and cultural history, and the resources it makes available to do so.

Already, the national library is facing significant cutbacks and will lose about a quarter of its former staffing level, bringing employment down to about 80.

By comparison, the Finnish national library, which serves a similarly sized population, has 250 employees.

“We’re small even by the standards of small national libraries,” says Murphy. “The big fear is always the fear of loss – that material will disappear if we don’t save it, and end up in a digital black hole. Students in five years may not be able to find the raw materials of Irish history.”