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Hypermedia Online Publishing: the Transformation of the Scholarly Journal

5.2.7 Archiving

Archiving is usually performed by libraries not by publishers. In fact, most publishers regard their responsibility as having ended once they have shipped each issue of a journal. Paper has its difficulties as an archiving medium (acid-decay, flammability, storage requirements) but they are familiar difficulties and techniques for dealing with them are well known.

The new digital media on which electronic publications are stored (both on servers and on user's own workstations) pose a range of challenging problems to librarians and archivists needing to store them for long periods. The Commission on Preservation and Access has devoted considerable resources to this problem. Some of the issues raised in their best-known report on the subject [Lesk, 1992] are:

technological obsolescence is a greater danger than deterioration
devices (and their associated media) may disappear for business reasons
many of the technologies involve some kind of format, as well as a physical device.
it is not possible to detect the state of the medium via mere physical inspection
format, software and hardware are often intermingled: information may be preserved but if the software to print, search, and edit it has gone, it may be quite costly to make any use of it.

On the plus side, digital media can

allow for very fast retrieval of archived information
store information very compactly
allow for easy copying of information for preservation.

These characteristics will require all those involved in the scholarly journal ecology to rethink their role with respect to archiving.

One initiative that may point the way to a class of solutions to e-journal archiving is Electronic Collections Online (ECO) from OCLC. ECO has the following characteristics:

Publishers have granted OCLC archival rights to journals in the collection.
OCLC builds and maintains a subscription profile for each participating library.
A library's rights to the archive remain active regardless of their current subscription status.
OCLC will ensure that they migrate the service to provide ongoing access.

Mindful of ongoing concerns about future access, OCLC is also working to ensure that libraries will have access to their journals even if Electronic Collections Online is discontinued.

Last modified: Monday, 11-Dec-2017 14:40:12 AEDT