Trends in Preserving Scholarly Electronic Journals

Abstract

Scholarly electronic journals have become the largest and fastest growing segment of digital collections for most libraries. Many issues and concerns for managing electronic journals relate to preserving and providing continued access to them. The preserving of scholarly electronic journals is a complex issue with various aspects and is largely different from archiving of print-based scholarly journals. In this paper the author deals with issues concerning archiving of scholarly electronic journals. The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss different issues related to preserving scholarly electronic journals. The following issues are discussed: differences between print and digital media, shift in the responsibility of archiving, copyright and intellectual property rights, cost of archiving, expertise, selection, redundancy, organizational issues, etc. Technical issues and challenges related to digital preservation include a lack of practical implementations of preservation standards and a lack of technical knowledge, in general, of what information is required to support the digital preservation process within organizations. Nevertheless, digital preservation has received considerably more prominence in recent years, gaining the attention of entities such as national libraries, national archives and other organizations.