Archiving scholarly material: one publisher's perspective

Abstract

We need large digital archives to preserve scholarly content for generations to come, and we need them now. Deciding who should do the archiving, what to archive, where in the scholarly community archiving should be undertaken, and how to do it successfully, is starting to come into focus. A brief review of the scholarly digital archiving efforts underway reveals some commonality of intent. This can be contrasted with a clear need for decisions regarding the scope of what should be digitally archived and, ultimately, how archives in their many forms might be best constructed. While exploring how we might archive digital material, we can turn our attention to which critical success factors to consider in adopting any archiving solution. These factors include their governance (community), economic stability, technical soundness, their community acceptability, and ease of use. Several current solutions are examined within this framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]