JSTOR’s New Initiative to Archive Electronic Journals

Eileen Gifford Fenton
Director of Production
JSTOR

Kevin M. Guthrie
President
JSTOR

The academic and publishing communities have moved into the 21st century with ever-increasing reliance on digital content, but methods for preserving this content have not emerged. Consequently, establishing a production-level archiving system is a matter of increasing urgency to avoid the loss of important scholarly literature. As a not-for-profit organization dedicated to preserving scholarly literature, JSTOR’s mission argues for the organization to take on this challenge. In doing so, JSTOR will continue to take a system-wide perspective, balancing the needs of libraries, publishers, and users in the delivery of the archive. The broad principles that govern JSTOR’s approach will be the same for both our paper-based and born-electronic efforts, however, the specific terms of implementation for the e-archive are likely to differ from those that characterize our existing print-based model.