Preservation of Knowledge Part 2: Digital Archives

摘要

In last month's , I addressed the role of paper and microfilm as media for the preservation of written knowledge, particularly biomedical literature. A significant number of journals are now electronically archived including the ( ). The HighWire Press data base contains 1232 journals and more than 5.6 million articles as of this writing. According to my last count, the Elsevier and Springer journal data bases contain 2320 and 2084 scientific journals, respectively! It is hard to believe all of these journals can be kept in their past and current print forms and archived for posterity. Most current journals are, however, archived in digital form. The main topic of this article is to discuss some of these electronic data bases.