Power Simon: National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna MAtauranga o Aotearoa) Bill — In Committee 
Power Simon: National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna MAtauranga o Aotearoa) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:607;Page:4943] 
SIMON POWER (NZ National—Rangitikei) 
: 
 Mr Chairman— 
Hon Lianne Dalziel 
: Good to see you! 
SIMON POWER 
: I thank the Minister; it is good to be here. I was transferred on to the Education and Science Committee part-way through the hearings of evidence and the work that had been done on the bill. I have to confess that when the matter came up on the select committee business agenda I perhaps did not initially take this bill as seriously as I should have. However when I sat and listened to some of the evidence— 
John Carter 
: Really! 
SIMON POWER 
: This is quite an important point on what is quite an interesting bill. When the evidence came before the select committee and the officials came and spent some time going through the bill with us it became apparent to me that it was an important wee piece of legislation. As we worked through a series of questions with the officials about how the legal depositing would work how modern Internet would be dealt with—particularly from my point of view from a copyright perspective—and how the National Library would control the rights that connect to electronic data that was to be stored by the National Library I found the whole thing surprisingly quite fascinating. 
My colleague Katherine Rich outlined some of the initial views that she had on the bill. Some of those did not resonate with me as much as the issues that relate to legal deposit. There was a whole range of submissions supporting the extension of that deposit to cover electronic publications. At first glance that might seem like a pretty standard uninteresting thing to say. In fact it is an extremely difficult thing to do not only in terms of gathering and maintaining that information not only in terms of the copyright and the legal issues that surround who owns that information but also in the way in which Internet and electronic information can change so quickly. The question for the officials was: “How do we capture a moment in time of that electronic information then commit it to our records to represent that precise moment of information?” It might sound like a bizarre concept but when we talked it through with the officials one thing that became absolutely clear was that this is not a straightforward business. 
My colleague Katherine Rich made the comment that in some places this bill may be unnecessary and perhaps a little repetitive in terms of the practical things that exist. The classic example of that—and I remember questioning the officials on this—was clause 13(1): “There is an office of chief librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library.” To my way of thinking why do we have that in legislation? If there is a chief librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library that is great and that person should be left to just get on with the job. However it was explained to me that it was not that straightforward and that I needed to consider other issues about the relationship that that chief librarian had in relation to the chief librarian of the National Library and other officers who worked in the National Library. 
However I return to what I initially set out to talk about—that is the issue of storing information in an electronic form. Seeing as we have a wide-ranging debate the Minister the Hon Marian Hobbs is in the chair and it seems as though an agreement has been reached to let the Committee rise early once everybody has had a say on this issue I would not mind if the Minister would take a call to give us a bit of view on how the policy process works through that storage at one point in time of any of that information. One thing is for sure that cannot have been a straightforward process. What does one do if a website shows information one day the National Library decides it will store the information as at that date and then the information changes in 24 hours which it does? At which point should the library collect that electronic information at which point is the library able to make a decision as to when that information should be deposited and at which point does it determine when that information is most important? That cannot be an easy problem for the National Library and I wish it well.