Friday, July 20, 2001

Harvard U. and 3 Publishers Develop Experimental Online Archive By BURTON BOLLAG The Harvard University Library and three major publishers of scholarly journals have joined forces to design an experimental archive for electronic journals. The aim is to find better ways to handle such challenges as long-term preservation and devising rules for access. Working with Harvard are Blackwell Publishing, John Wiley, and the University of Chicago Press. The project is being financed with a $145,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. One issue it will examine is how to design long-term digital archives. Paper books and journals have lifetimes extending many decades, and once acquired, require little more than to be kept in a dry place. But "most digital things, if left unattended for 10 years, become unusable," says Dale Flecker, associate director for planning and systems in the Harvard University Library. That is because digital technologies are developing so fast that they soon become obsolete. Archiving may often require a different technology than that used for current access to digital materials. While finding long-term solutions to archiving text presents more modest problems, archiving the other objects that electronic journals increasingly contain presents a much greater challenge. These include sound and video files, computer simulations and computer data sets. The project also will try to determine how to set rules for access to archives. "Publishers wouldn't want us to distribute information in competition with them," says Mr. Flecker. He expects the solution will be archiving licenses that would set out the conditions of access. The project will extend for the current calendar year. The outcome is expected to be a detailed proposal for an experimental archive of electronic journals at Harvard. Organizers expect that it will soon contain all 900 of the journals of the three participating publishers, as well as other titles. Harvard will seek further funding from the Mellon Foundation to set up the archive. The pilot is one of seven under way this calendar year with grants from Mellon. The others are being coordinated by the university libraries of Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Universities; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the University of Pennsylvania; and the New York Public Library. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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