>> We're starting to look into the possibility of "archiving" scholarly
>> and technical e-journals, rather than just linking to them. The
>> essential concern is that if the remote web site goes down or we
>> somehow lose access to the files there, we don't "have" any of the
>> sources (unlike paper journals--if the publisher goes under, you've
>> still got the back issues).
..
>>
>> Is anyone else addressing this issue at their library?
WebWhacker and PDF technology notwithstanding, I do hope there aren't many
librarians considering this approach. While I can understand the
motivations, which are based on familiar journal patterns established in the
print age, the dynamics of online information through the Web will be quite
different. Interactivity, for a start, will be impossible if all you see are
mirrors of information that are out of date before they have been completely
downloaded. It is surely futile for every library to consider archiving its
own copy of all online information journals.
Our experience with publishing project papers on the Web is that we have
declined requests to mirror these papers simply because we intend to make
periodic updates and we didn't want to propagate obsolete versions. To
indicate this we attached a notice that was modified from an original posted
on the Los Alamos Physics e-print archive, which completely disapproves of
unauthorized mirroring and large-scale copying of its contents, again not to
restrict access but to ensure consistency.
This is not to say that mirrors have no function or to deny the benefits of
authorised mirror sites, but there typically only needs to be a modest
number of mirrors for any site.
Nor does this response resolve the very real problem of archiving in
perpetuity the new digital materials - it probably adds to the problem - but
it will be better to sort this problem than to bypass it.
Steve Hitchcock, Open Journal Project,
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
Southampton University, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1703 594479 Fax: +44 (0)1703 592865
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk
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