1. ETDs - a good start for preservation activities?

Most of our activities in the field of electronic publications started with ETDs as "candidates". Why? You may assume, it is because we judge them as the core of our digital cultural heritage. Yet, in the first place it is because we prefer to start new workflows using quite simple object categories. ETDs have a quite simple bibliographic appearance: monographic, finite and stable without versioning problems, without complications like "successively issued" and "integrating" publication types. Working on long-term preservation and perpetual access for digital resources is a task of considerable complexity. It needs an encouraging start. The second reason for our choice was, that ETDs publishing process is not driven by the publishing market and by commercial players with their very different interests compared to an archive or a library. Our colleagues at universities and university libraries are cooperative and friendly people. They understand, share and promote our ideas about long-term availability. It is also exciting to talk to commercial publishers about implementation of delivery procedures for digital resources and metadata, but when it comes to assigning manpower, cooperation can get very difficult. The third point relates to the second: our colleagues at the universities can even influence the creation process for ETDs to support "preservation friendliness". Rising awareness, stipulation of publication workflows and document structures including practical support are actual examples for this active influence.

As a national legal deposit library, we have to be conscious about the "real world problems", when we start building our long-term preservation strategies using ETDs: digital resources in general are very heterogeneous, signs for standardization are still hardly to be seen. Their appearance is determined by the economic conditions of the publication market and the requirements of present-day users. The needs of our children and grandchildren have to be kept in mind and ensured by libraries and archives. It is their key role to preserve and guarantee access to our scientific and cultural heritage as recorded in publications and archival records. The decision of what has to be secured for the future should not be based on technical simplicity and feasibility, but on long-term content value.

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