Team Digital Preservation
The National Library of Norway has carried out large-scale digitisation of Norway’s cultural heritage since 2006, resulting in the production of extensive amounts of data. To ensure a consistent and long-term approach to managing this digital material, a dedicated team focusing exclusively on the preservation of the National Library’s digital collections was established in 2022.
The data we receive for preservation includes both digital material covered by the Legal Deposit Act and material digitised by the National Library itself. Digitisation is carried out both from the Library’s own collections and on behalf of various institutions within the LAM sector 1. The team manages all types of digital material, regardless of whether it originates from analogue sources or is born digital. This includes media such as websites, text documents, images, audio, and moving images.
The team is responsible for managing solutions for the long-term preservation of digital material and handles the entire preservation lifecycle. This includes ingesting data, performing validation and quality assurance, ensuring safe and secure storage, and preserving the material over time. In addition, the team facilitates appropriate access to the material. Digital preservation involves documenting the origin of the content, ensuring that it remains unaltered, and making certain that the material can be understood and used, both now and in the future. This is achieved, among other things, by ensuring that sufficient metadata is preserved alongside the data, and by documenting all actions performed on the material in our custody. The team does not produce data but assumes responsibility once digital material is transferred from internal production workflows or external contributors. The team is also not responsible for the production or management of access copies, only for preservation copies.
The Digital Preservation Team works closely with other specialised media teams within the organisation and collaborates with external partners both nationally and internationally. The team is also a member of the Digital Preservation Coalition.
Organisation
The Digital Preservation team consist of 8 members:
This team reports to a committee of leaders responsible for this area in the National Library. The members are:
- IT Director (Product owner)
- Director of Digitalizing Cultural Heritage
- Head of Metadata Standards Development Section
- Head of IT Platform Section
The National Library’s digital collection in numbers
- Over 2 billion files
- More than 100 different file formats
- 18 Petabytes of data (that’s 18,000 Terabytes!) stored in 3 copies
- The largest single file is 2.5 Terabytes
- Daily ingest of new material averages over 6 Terabytes
Data volume by type
- Video and television: 22%
- Film: 21%
- Newspapers: 19%
- Web Archive: 16%
- Radio and audio: 12%
- Books: 8%
- Photos: 2%
LAM is a collective term for libraries, archives, and museums, and is used to describe the sector responsible for managing, preserving, and disseminating documentation and cultural heritage. ↩︎