Within a few years, they could constitute a significant proportion of the Library's total budget. The Library needs good data to use in developing its policies, building its expertise and justifying its budgets. Therefore, this effort will establish baselines statistics for the size of the open-access web, the proportion of materials of interest, the rate of growth, and the costs of various strategies for collecting, access and preservation. Technical planning T echnically, collecting and preserving born digital materials appear to be forbidding tasks. Potentially, the Library could be expected to collect materials in any format, including programs that run on any system and databases structured in any bizarre fashion.
Metadata provided by creators can follow any standard or none.
Fortunately, the situation is not as bad as it seems. Many of the most important materials are actively managed by some external organization, whose self-interest is served by preservation and continual migration to new technology. Other information is designed for delivery to the public and therefore follows standards that are compatible with widely distributed software, such as web browsers. Preservation of these materials is a significant task, but at least the technology that must be accommodated is well supported. The principal approaches to preservation are refreshing bits by copying them to different media and migration of content from one format and computing system to another.