Re: Libraries and archiving (Re: RE: If electronic is to replace paper)

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btinternet.com>]

I appreciate that liblicence is US based but those commenting about
archiving should be aware that in other parts of the world, national
libraries or groups of libraries around the national libary are perceived
by the government and indeed themselves consider that it is their duty to
preserve the national electronic heritage. Schemes for such archiving
which involve decisions on access are well-advanced and are moving from
voluntary to compulsary deposit in some cases and will do eventually in
others. All these schemes have involved a lot of hard work and a lot of
compromises

One generalisation which I can make, as one involved in the UK plans which
involve the Publishers Association and the British Library, is that the
technical problems are really difficult to deal with and the decisons
connected with access and distribution equally so but for different
reasons.

On the technical side Ted Freeman is doing a disservice to the library
community, if not perhaps to the interests of his own commercial
organisation, if he portrays the technicalities of archiving of electronic
material as easy to handle particularly insofar as these technicalities
involve migration/emulation and how you handle links.

Anthony Watkinson

----- Original Message -----
From: Ted Freeman <tfreeman@allenpress.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, November 19, 1999 12:32 AM
Subject: Re: Libraries and archiving (Re: RE: If electronic is to replace
paper)


>
> I agree with Mr. Meyer about libraries acting as useful archives for
> thousands of online journals. The reality is that libraries can "archive"
> or store data in various formats currently being used by publishers to
> deliver journals, such as PDF, HTML, SGML/XML, Postscript, TeX, plain
> ASCII text, etc. (some of which, as Meyer points out, will cease to be
> usable over time). But can they afford and do they have the expertise to
> build, maintain and refresh the systems to integrate and deliver all of
> this data effectively to their patrons, particularly given the variety of
> SGML/XML DTDs and searching and linking algorithms involved in the
> publishers' delivery systems? "Getting the content out to market in a
> reasonably durable format," as an earlier arguer put it, is still what the
> publishers are doing when they build elaborate full-text journal web sites
> using an SGML database. As it happens, they're also building in some cases
> impressive archives and universal access points at the same time,
> something only libraries were able to do effectively in the world of
> print. But publishers are not going to give libraries the proprietary
> source code driving these sites that has cost them in some cases hundreds
> of thousands if not millions of dollars to create, and which would be
> difficult to assimilate and to integrate by a third party in any case.
>
> Ted Freeman
> --------------