Librarians and scholars are now relying more upon the enhanced convenience and functionality of digital resources and looking to trusted archives to provide ongoing preservation and access to electronic content. At JSTOR, the need to archive electronic content was recognized at the inception of the project with the creation of the moving wall, which acknowledges that our mission to serve as a lasting and trusted archive has both a prospective and retrospective component. Other voices in the community offered early indicators of the importance of preserving access to electronic content, including the 1996 statement, Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information by John Garrett and Donald J. Waters, prepared for the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group (ftp://ftp.rlg.org/pub/archtf/final-report.pdf).

In 2000, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation demonstrated its deep concern for the e-archiving issue by initiating an Electronic Journal Archiving Program (http://www.diglib.org/preserve/ejp.htm), awarding grants to seven academic libraries. This effort to find practical ways of building an organizational framework to support the e-archiving task produced several important findings. First, especially in these early days of the evolution of e-archiving, it seems important to pursue multiple approaches to solve this problem. To date, at least two approaches are emerging. The first of these, the "presentation file" approach, captures and caches the presentation files made available via the Internet (see the LOCKSS project at Stanford: http://lockss.stanford.edu/projectdescbrief.htm). The second, the "source file" approach, works directly with publishers to export as much of the source content as possible to an agreed-upon central repository. As each approach appears to be technically feasible, Mellon has decided to continue to help fund the development of both.

It was also clear from the findings of the Mellon program that to continue the e-archiving effort would require significant financial resources. A successful e-archiving endeavor would require development of several key interdependent organizational components, including an access model, a business model, and a sustainable revenue model, to name a few. During the first round of grants from Mellon to the seven academic libraries, determining how to establish these components within an academic institution proved very challenging. This finding led to the conclusion that a separate organization dedicated to the task of e-archiving journal literature is needed to maximize the probability for success.

As these findings emerged, JSTOR's own work with electronic content was continuing. For several titles in the archive, the moving walls were beginning to meet up with the born-digital content of those journals. As our commitment is to provide a trusted and comprehensive archive, regardless of format, our work with publishers in testing various born-digital data examples has been yielding useful findings. Our ongoing work and approach to e-archiving has been shaped by a number of elements fundamental to JSTOR. Chief among these are our status as a not-for-profit organization and our mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in information technology. In pursuing this mission, we have taken a system-wide perspective and focused on building a trusted long-term archive. Our approach to e-archiving is shaped by the relationships we have built with over 1,400 libraries in 70 countries and agreements we have established with nearly 180 publishers, who publish thousands of journals. Additionally, we have a solid foundation in place from converting nearly 10M journal pages and providing continual access to the JSTOR archive in accordance with an access model that balances the needs of publishers, libraries and scholars. Our perspective is further formed by our experience developing - in the not-for-profit sector - a business model which distributes the recovery of operating costs across a wide range of institutions, while creating an endowment that enables the archive to continue to grow and be migrated to new technologies and standards as needed.

JSTOR's work on e-archiving has drawn staff from existing JSTOR units, and we are now creating a separate unit within JSTOR dedicated to e-archiving and developing a "source file" approach. To help fund the start-up of this unit, we have received generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. As our work progresses toward an e-archiving solution for electronic versions of titles in the JSTOR archive, we expect that this solution will have broad applicability and offer important system-wide benefits. This system-wide perspective is important, as JSTOR develops an approach to e-archiving that includes the possibility of offering an electronic archive of content beyond our current collection of titles and publishers. In doing so, we believe we will be directly supporting JSTOR's mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in information technology. According to Eileen Gifford Fenton, Director of Production at JSTOR, who is leading JSTOR's e-archiving effort:

Developing a framework and an approach to support e-archives is an extremely important challenge. At this early stage, and in this rapidly evolving environment, our community needs to engage in a variety of archiving efforts. JSTOR's mission, our experience providing a trusted archive of digitized backfiles, and our relationships with publishers, libraries and scholars places us at the intersection of those most concerned with the e-archiving issue. We are confident that we can develop an approach that balances the interests and needs of all constituents to find a solution that will insure that today's electronic journals will be available to tomorrow's scholars and students.

During the JSTOR Participants' Meetings at the ALA Annual Conference this past June, and at the IFLA Conference in August, these issues were presented in an effort to solicit basic feedback as to whether participants considered e-archiving to be a reasonable extension of JSTOR's activity. While participants acknowledged that e-archiving presented significant challenges, they supported JSTOR's commitment to exploring the best means by which it could be achieved. If you have particular thoughts or comments that you would like to share with us on this subject, please don't hesitate to contact us at support@jstor.org.

Last updated on September 8, 2006