Pandora Archive

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For other uses, see Pandora (disambiguation) and Pandora's box (disambiguation).

PANDORA - Australia's Web Archive is the national web archive for the preservation of Australia's online publications. It was established by the National Library of Australia in 1996, and is now built in collaboration with a number of other Australian state libraries and cultural collecting organisations, including the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the Australian War Memorial, and the National Film and Sound Archive.

The name, PANDORA, is an acronym that encapsulates its mission: Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia.

The PANDORA Archive collects selected Australian web resources, preserves them, and makes them available for viewing. Access to the archive is made available to the public via the Pandora web site. Web sites are selected based on their cultural significance and research value in the long term.

There is no legal deposit provision in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 for digital format publications so that permission is sought from publishers before a web site can be copied to the PANDORA archive.

The archival management system called PANDAS (PANDORA Digital Archiving System) is used to add a title into PANDORA. This was developed and is maintained by the National Library of Australia. The latest version is PANDAS 3 which was deployed in mid 2007.


[edit] History

The first two titles were downloaded in October 1996. By June 1997 the Archive contained 31 titles.

In August 1998 the State Library of Victoria became a participant in adding content to the Archive. By March 2004 all of the mainland State libraries, the Northern Territory Library, the National Film and Sound Archive, the Australian War Memorial and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies had become participants. The State Library of Tasmania is not participating in PANDORA, but is running its own project called Our Digital Island.


As of February 2008 there were 17,951 discrete websites/titles within the Archive comprising 2.01 TB of data.

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