As the need for digital content increases almost daily, preserving this content for university libraries, especially in the least developed and developing nations, becomes a challenge, resulting in the loss of this data. Even though most of these libraries are automated and adopt one digital preservation strategy or the other, library users need…

Research communications today are largely conducted by digital means. At this time, however, only a small percentage of these digital communiques are archived and preserved for future use. This article provides an overview of the challenge of this digital grey literature, a brief overview of digital archiving, and the role librarians and…

This article describes the roles of librarians in a research library, particularly in the digital era. Librarians' roles vary from the custodian of resources to providers of a diverse nature of activities ranging from collection development, organization of knowledge, information services, preservation and conservation, and management. Librarians…

Increasingly libraries are expected to play a role in scientific data curation initiatives, i.e., "the management and preservation of digital data over the long-term." This case study offers a novel approach for identifying researchers who are receptive toward library involvement in data curation. The authors interviewed researchers at…

Our institutions of record are facing a new digital knowledge management challenge: stakeholder communities are now expecting customized Web interfaces to institutional knowledge repositories, online environments where community members can contribute content and see themselves represented, as well as access archived resources. Digital curation…

Recent surveys indicate that many colleges and universities have reached a pivotal moment in assessing the function and future development of their institutional repositories. Other surveys convey that archivists are participating in the development and implementation of institutional repositories at a variety of levels and have contributed to the…

This paper reports on a questionnaire survey of 16 national libraries designed to clarify how national libraries attempt to justify their web archiving activities. Results indicate they envisage that a) the benefits brought about by their initiatives are greater than the overall costs, b) the costs imposed on libraries are greater than the costs…

"Research Library Issues" ("RLI") is a bimonthly report from ARL (Association of Research Libraries), CNI (Coalition of Networked Information), and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). This issue includes the following articles: (1) Removing All Restrictions: Cornell's New Policy on Use of Public…

Libraries of government departments provide information to policymakers, to government staff and employees, and, sometimes, to the general public. It is essential that libraries of government departments are organised and managed so as to collect and provide the information most needed by government decision makers, government workers, and the…

This article examines what is implied by the term "trusted" in the phrase "trusted digital repositories." Digital repositories should be able to preserve electronic materials for periods at least comparable to existing preservation methods. Our collective lack of experience with preserving digital objects and consensus about the reliability of our…

The rapid adoption of information technology and ubiquitous networking has transformed the research and education landscape. Central to this transformation are scientific and engineering digital data collections. The life cycle management challenges associated with these intellectual assets are substantial. This is a report of a two-day workshop…