"Archiving" e-journals

[Bob Smith - Concordia Theo. Seminary]

On Thu, 11 Apr 1996, Jim Hart wrote:

> Is it really necessary to duplicate/mirror an entire site this way?
> Wouldn't it be better to just point to their stuff in some way?  How
> about indexing their pages with a search engine?  Or, maybe one of the
> existing search engines already indexes them?
> 
> Jim Hart <jhart at h5.avcnet.org>
>    "Working together, we _can_ make a difference."

Dear Jim, Friends,

I hate to say it, but speaking as a historian and an archivist, the 
answer is yes. Material of historical importance simply must be preserved 
in some fashion that insures it will be around when scholars study our 
time fifty, one hundred, one hundred-fifty years from now. As librarians 
of research institutions, we are already frantically looking for funding 
to preserve items published on wood pulp paper in the late nineteenth 
century. Archivists and preservationists go nuts trying to move material 
from vinyl records, tape recordings, eight tracks, the Beta format and so 
on, so that the information doesn't go the way of Clementine in the 
Western folk song. 

Journals are a scholarly publication's medium of record.  The very fruits 
of scholarship in given disciplines are recorded there. Electronic 
Journals are wonderful in timliness, lack of expense, distribution and 
paricipation. Dare we assume that ascii, html, TCP/IP, CD-ROM and the 
like will be with us forever? I think not.

What this means is that, ideally, the resource provider should produce a 
permenant record of it at some point. Mirroring whole sites, backing 
them up, etc. helps a great deal, but there's no substitute for printing 
them out, toner to acid free paper, and placing them in an archival 
environment, or putting the lot on microfilm.

Do we do this with everything electronic? Hardly. The average email from 
the average person is not of enduring value. But President Clinton's 
email? Speaker Gingrich's....

Sincerely,

Bob

   | Rev. Robert E. Smith      | Email: cosmithb at ash.palni.edu |
   | Public Services Librarian | Phone: (219) 452-2123         |
   | Concordia Theo. Seminary  | Ft. Wayne, Indiana            | 
   |       http://www.palni.edu/~cosmithb/concordia.html       |