Challenges and Opportunities Presented by Archiving in the Electronic Era

With the rapid development of electronic and network technologies, there is considerable and justifiable concern in the academic community about the challenges associated with protecting electronic information for future generations of scholars and students. As a not-for-profit organization founded specifically to build and provide a trusted central repository of important journal literature in electronic form, JSTOR has been working on the problem of electronic archiving since its founding. Unfortunately, there are no simple or easy solutions to this problem and this brief essay does not attempt to provide them. Rather, the purpose of this paper is to share JSTOR's experience and reflect upon the key principles we have identified that must be addressed if one is to maintain reliable long-term access to electronic content. The scope of this archiving discussion is limited to published journal literature, admittedly a small subset of the digital materials that require attention. Still, many of the issues raised in the journals context apply more generally as well.