Key issue

Abstract

Electronic journals have come to dominate the field of academic literature, and it is of great importance to the international scientific community that this electronic intellectual output is preserved well and that it remains accessible in perpetuity.The traditional principles for the archiving of printed academic literature no longer suffice in the digital world.These are based on national frontiers: each national deposit library preserves its own national academic heritage. Regarding electronic publications, however, the geographical criterion is not very useful and the geographical provenance of material is irrelevant, since electronic data can exist independently of a geographic location. Most current journals of multinational publishers no longer have a fatherland that can be easily identified. New ways of cooperation in the field of long-term digital archiving of electronic publications and its metadata will emerge.This paper looks at the policy and ambitions of the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) regarding digital archiving of electronic publications.