2b.iii Digital archives, sustainability, and access
Basic strategies of preservation, upkeep, and ongoing access in the print medium have changed little since the arrival of the mechanically-produced book, though the details of those systems have undergone changes with the advent of technological developments that enabled certain strategies. Change has also been driven by need: some examples are the emergence of classification systems at the turn of the century to handle the exponentially-increasing numbers of books, and the movement toward ‘universal’ libraries and national collections.
Many aspects of these basic strategies are transportable to the electronic medium, but most require modification to take into account three things:
- the pace of technological change, which manifests itself, for example, in old electronic materials that already require special technological considerations to remain functional;
- the fact that electronic materials are much more malleable than those in print (so versioning becomes a more complex issue); and
- new basic functionality and interoperation possibilities that computation allows us to consider and enact on electronic materials – all, again, from the perspective of the user.
From the perspectives of sustainability and access, databases are deploying a number of economic models for support and access. The following examples should be investigated in terms of their viability for the humanities projects under consideration here:
A. MEMBERSHIP MODEL: JSTOR, which provides database access to journal archives, was established with major Mellon Foundation funding, and is sustained on a membership basis. Memberships are available for institutions alone, with libraries and schools paying an initiation fee along with an annual fee, based on size. Access is restricted to individuals who belong to a member institution.
B. INSTITUTIONAL SPONSORSHIP MODEL: Representative Poetry Online is, in good measure, the work of a local champion, Ian Lancashire, with sponsorship from University of Toronto's Office of the Provost, the Faculty of Arts and Science, the Department of English and the Library (which hosts the database). This is seen as a public service, and the contents are open-access.
C. INSTITUTIONAL SPONSOR / MAJOR GRANT MODEL: The principal archive in physics, arXiv.org, is sustained by funding from Cornell, which hosts it as a matter of public service, offsetting some expenses with grant funding from NSF. The contents are open-access.
D. SUBSCRIPTION / OPEN ACCESS MODEL: Highwire Press, operated by the Stanford University Library, provides access to close to a 1,000 journals principally on the basis of personal or institutional subscriptions to individual journal titles. Journals provide around a million articles free of charge, some offering immediate open access, others using the model of delayed open access. The delay between for-pay publication and free release runs from 6 to 24 months.
E. ENDOWMENT MODEL: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is seeking donations to generate sufficient funds to manage the continuing development of the project: <http://plato.stanford.edu/fundraising/>. The contents are open access.
F. COOPERATIVE MODEL: Something of an ideal, yet to be fully realized, that combines A and E, insofar as membership among principally interested libraries comes together to support and contribute in-kind to sustaining a cooperative database that provides open access to all.
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