The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's
E-Journal Archives Program
Increasingly scholarly journals are published electronically.
What will it take to keep them accessible electronically in
perpetuity? Can the property rights of publishers, the access
responsibilities of libraries, and the reliability assurances
that scholars need be reconciled in agreements to create archives
of electronic journals?
Seven major libraries are using grants from The Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation to plan solutions in a program that the Digital
Library Federation (DLF) helped develop and continues to
assist.
The Projects
The new Mellon Electronic Journal Archiving Program recently
awarded funding to the New York Public Library and the university
libraries of Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Pennsylvania, Stanford, and
Yale:
- Yale, Harvard, and Pennsylvania are working with individual
publishers on archiving their electronic journals of all
kinds
- Cornell and the New York Public Library are working on
archiving journals in specific disciplines
- MIT's project involves archiving "dynamic" e-journals that
change frequently, and Stanford's project involves software
testing for a distributed digital archiving system.
The Mellon Program developed out of concerns raised in early 2000
by the DLF, the Council on Library and Information Resources
(CLIR), and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). When
scholarly journals were published only in print, libraries bought
them, preserved them physically in library stacks, and made them
available to scholars and students on site. But how can libraries
get access to journals published electronically and make them
available to patrons without violating publishers' proprietary
rights? How can journals published only electronically be
preserved for access long-term? And how can scholars be assured
that journals they receive electronically are authentic and
unaltered?
Consensus
In search of answers, the DLF and its partners organized a series
of three meetings, one each for librarians, publishers, and
licensing specialists. These groups reached consensus on minimum
requirements for e-journal archival requirements.
Building on that consensus, The Mellon Foundation asked
selected research universities to propose projects of use in
developing accessible archives of e-journals. In February 2001,
the Mellon Foundation brought together the accepted participants,
and will convene them again after the one-year planning process.
At the request of the participants, CLIR and the DLF will host
additional meetings and workshops to facilitate exploration of
common interests and challenges.
For more information visit our Web site,
www.diglib.org/preserve/ejp.htm,
or contact us by e-mail at
dlf@clir.org, by phone at
202-939-4750, or by post at DLF, Council on Library and
Information Resources, Suite 500, 1755 Massachusetts
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