Preservation of and permanent access to electronic information resources: A system perspective

The rapid growth in the creation and dissemination of electronic information has emphasized the digital environment’s speed and ease of dissemination with little regard for its long-term preservation and access. To some extent, electronic libraries, that is those libraries that are moving toward provision of materials in electronic form, have been swept up in this attitude as well. Electronic information includes a variety of object types such as electronic journals, e-books, databases, data sets, reference works, and web sites, which are born digital or which have their primary version in digital form.