From Pricing To Preservation

[Lois Weinstein <mlcny@metgate.metro.org>]

As the Executive Director of a medical library consortium that maintains a
collection of over 400,000 volumes of older journals, I am fascinated with
the discussions on this listserv that seem, to me, to be mainly about
cost.  I wonder what you are all doing or thinking about preservation
issues.  In the past, I have asked many publishers, in the medical and STM
fields, how far back their print journal collections go and have been very
interested to learn that they usually do NOT have the older jorunals. They
generally retain only the last 5 or maybe 10 years. If they are not
interested in preserving their own print publications, what makes anyone
think they will "preserve" the electronic materials?  And if they are not
going to do it, who will?

I also see this growing into a much more serious problem 10 or 20 years
from now when most, if not all journals, will be electronic. The
maintenance of an electronic journal is probably going to cost much more
than a print journal due to the changes in software and hardware that will
take place. Besides OCLC, are their any non-profits or commercial
companies devoted to maintaining these electronic journals in perpetuity?