Preservation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage by Means of Digital Libraries

Abstract

The entire world’s cultural and educational resources are being more and more 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, are now an integral part of the world’s cultural heritage. Consequently preservation of cultural and scientific heritage has undergone substantial changes and has come across new challenges. Traditional methods for preservation have been backed by technological tools of enormous capacities, creating the impression of a constant “revolution”. Most importantly, preservation has shifted from a passive stance (storage) to more active attitude (digitization, migration). However, the transition from the analogue past to the digital future is not smooth, as one would hope (or at least as libraries and their users would have hoped). The digital collection and preservation of on-line cultural and scientific assets was faced with legal instruments pertaining to “analogue age”, such as the legal deposit and the traditional rules of copyright law, which in the digital age seem as inadequate tools for the effective preservation of cultural and scientific heritage and the securing of a wide access to that heritage. Recent and pending changes in the areas of legal deposit and Copyright law attempt to modernize the legislation, but as it is demonstrated, a lot more has to be done in that direction. This chapter presents an overview of the present situation, challenges and problems with a focus on European Community and International Law.