Theme 3: Electronic Information Resources
Preservation Issues
"The committee recommends that the Library determine how long-term access to the material contained in online journals will be maintained. In the past libraries bound journals and kept them on the shelves, and if space was limited, the journals could be converted to microfilm and stored. Now, however, the journals do not exist physically at the Library and it seems that continued access is entirely dependent on the online provider. Although phasing out print journals seems efficient and cost-effective there is the concern that online subscriptions do not guarantee the continued access that print subscriptions offer." Faculty Council's Committee on the Library, Annual Report 2003-2004
Unfortunately, truer words were never spoken: as we learned when we cancelled the IDEAL journals in 2002-2003, for many e-journal packages, you only have access so long as you continue to subscribe. (Some providers promise access via CD-ROM to those who cancel, or continuing online access to what has been paid for.) While long-term access somewhere is more or less ensured by projects like the Digital Library Federation http://www.diglib.org/preserve.htm , if not by publishers themselves who will protect what they can sell, individual libraries' access rights are another question, one for which there is as yet no conclusive answer.
