The documentary and digital heritage:
Public libraries, as universal gateways to knowledge, meet the basic
conditions for lifelong learning, independent decision-making and cultural
development of persons and social groups.
One of the chief tasks of such institutions is to instill a sense of the
cultural heritage and a taste for the arts.
The documentary heritage deposited in libraries and archives constitutes a
major part of the collective memory and reflects the diversity of languages,
peoples and cultures. Yet that memory is fragile. A considerable proportion
of the Iraqi's documentary heritage has disappeared during the invasion due
to looting and destruction.
The first and most urgent need is to ensure the preservation, using the most
appropriate means, of documentary heritage of world significance and to
promote that of the documentary heritage of national and regional
importance. It is just as important to make this heritage accessible to as
many people as possible, using the most appropriate technology, whether
inside or outside the countries of its location. High quality text, sound
and image banks could be set up and made available on local and global
networks, and reproductions made on all sorts of media including compact
disks, albums, books, postcards and microfilms. The proceeds from the sale
of by-products would then be ploughed back into preserving the documentary
heritage.
More and more of the entire world's cultural and educational resources are
being produced, distributed and accessed in digital form rather than on
paper. Born-digital heritage available on-line, including electronic
journals, World Wide Web pages or on-line databases, is now an integral part
of the world’s cultural heritage. However, digital information is subject to
rapid technical obsolescence or decay. The instability of the Internet is an
additional risk for knowledge accumulated in the html (hypertext markup
language) format. The need to safeguard this new form of indexed heritage
calls for international consensus on its storage, preservation and
dissemination. Such principles should seek to adapt and extend present
measures, procedures, legal instruments and archival techniques.
