Dale Flecker

Preserving Scholarly E-Journals

For research libraries, the long-term preservation of digital collections may well be the most important issue in digital libraries. In certain ways, digital materials are incredibly fragile, dependent for their continued utility upon technologies that undergo rapid and continual change. In the world of physical research materials, a great number of valuable research resources have been saved passively: acquired by individuals or organizations and stored in little-visited recesses. These physical resources are still viable decades later. This is not the case with the digital equivalents. Changes in computing technology will insure that, over relatively short timeframes, both the media and the technical format of old digital materials will become unusable. Keeping digital resources accessible for use by future generations will require conscious effort and continual investment.

A digital strategy for the Library of Congress

Digital libraries challenge the core practices of libraries and archiv es in many respects, not only in terms of accommodating digital information and technology, but also through the need to develop new economic and organizational models. As the worlds largest library, the Library of Congress (LC) perhaps faces the most profound questions of how to collect, catalog, preserve, and provide access to digital resources. LC asked the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies for advice in this area by commissioning the study that culminated with the publication of LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress. The panelists at this session will provide a brief summary of the LC21 report, review developments subsequent to the publication of LC21, and offer their thoughts on how the library community and information industry could engage LC to the benefit of the nation.