National Library Trove is a Treasure

The National Library of Australia provide Pandora: an archive of Australian web sites. This is a much more selective collection than the Internet Archive, but there are items in Pandora not in the Internet Archive. In particular, items from Australian government bodies which they would rather people forget about tend to not be in the Internet Archive but are in Pandora (thus justifying the name). The contents of Pandora are included in Trove, which also searches Australian library records and other cultural holdings.

An example of a website an organisation whanted to forget was that for the Sydney Olympic Games. The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) for that the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games ("SOCOG") had engaged in unlawful conduct by providing a web site which was to a significant extent inaccessible to the blind and $20,000 damages were awarded. After the games, SOCOG deleted the web site. However, there are copies in Pandora, which I was able to use for teaching web design at the Australian National University and to help the Beijing Organising Committee for the 2008 Olympics with the web design.

Today I was updating the notes for my Green Technology Strategies course. After the collapse of the Australaian Government's proposals for a carbon trading scheme the website of the Department of Climate Change was "updated" making many of the documents hard to find. I could not find the External Audit Consultation Paper on the site at all, but I found it in Pandora, using Trove.

Copyright and the Internet Archive, Canberra, 3 April 2008

Matthew Rimmer will be giving a free talk in Canberra, 3 April 2008, in the National Library's Digital Culture talk series on copyright law and the Internet Archive . Recommended:

Back to the future: copyright law, Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine

Dr Matthew Rimmer

Internet Archive provides free 'universal access to human knowledge' to researchers, historians, scholars and the general public. Their delightfully named Wayback Machine provides access to websites that have been significantly altered or may no longer exist. Notwithstanding this altruistic endeavour, Internet Archive has been embroiled in a number of policy debates over copyright law over the extension of copyright term, 'orphan' works, take-down notices, digital locks and large-scale digitisation projects. The Internet Archive has also been involved in litigation as a plaintiff, a defendant, and an amicus curiae (a friend of the court). In the light of such policy debate and litigation, there is a need to reform digital copyright laws so that digital libraries such as Internet Archive can flourish - without fear of disruption from copyright owners.

Dr Matthew Rimmer is a senior lecturer and the director of Higher Degree Research at the ANU College of Law, and an associate director of the Australian Centre for Intellectual Property in Agriculture (ACIPA). He holds a BA (Hons) and a University Medal in literature, and a LLB (Hons) from the Australian National University, and a PhD in law from the University of New South Wales. Rimmer is a member of the Copyright and Intellectual Property Advisory Group of the Australian Library and Information Association, and a director of the Australian Digital Alliance.

Dr Rimmer will be introduced by Laura Simes, Copyright Advisor, National Library of Australia

Date: Thursday 3 April 2008
Time: 12.30 to 13.30
Venue: Library Theatre
This talk is free and open to everyone.

Bobby Graham
Web Content Manager
Web Publishing Branch, IT Division
National Library of Australia
Tel: +61 2 6262 1542
www.nla.gov.au