Scholarly journal publishing is among the most important and vital areas of digital publishing today. Because of the long-term importance of electronic journals to scholarship, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the Harvard University Library a planning grant to study strategies to preserve them. Working with three major journal publishers and a number of other major research institutions, the University Library is analyzing the technical, business, social, and organizational issues associated with this formidable challenge. The goal is to define a large-scale cooperative archiving project that could be implemented in the very near future. Programs to care for the library's vast collections of photographic prints and negatives, to preserve the information recorded on failing videotape and motion picture film, and to rescue data stored on obsolete disks of all kinds, have yet to be developed.
Issues involving videotape are currently under investigation and a pilot project is planned.