title: Developing a National Preservation System for STM e-Journals: Presentation - iPRES 2005 - Göttingen
creators: Zhang Zhixiong Wan Ling Zhang Xiaolin
abstract: China is facing urgent needs for collaborative digital preservation strategies. The situation is more acute for foreign STM materials critical to key research and educational institutes, because, on one hand, in all of those institutes, STM e-journals becomes the major part of their library resources and represents the main streams of use, on the other hand, few of them have developed strategies and plans for long-term preservation and fewer have placed these efforts in a nationally coordinated and collaborative context.
  In this presentation, following an analysis of current practices in STM digital resources management in China, challenges are briefly explored for implementing an economically sound, service reliable, and organizationally sustainable digital preservation undertaking, and needs are recognized for a nationally collaborative preservation strategy and its corresponding policy framework to guide and coordinate preservation efforts of each and all the institutes.
  Structure models for Chinese national collaborative STM preservation networks are elaborated, considering (1) the technological, economic, administrative, and managerial responsibilities incurred by joining the national network, (2) the existing structures and responsibility schemes of current library systems, consortia, and other collaboration arrangements, especially in terms of digital resource development, and (3) various possible responsibility relations among various players, of any national preservation network, such as owners, preserving institutions, repository managers, targeted service audience, and preservation funding agencies, etc. Special consideration is further extended to the requirements for and possible implementation schemes for fail-safe mechanisms and succession planning in different contexts.
  Policies for implementing and managing a nationally coordinated distributed network of trustable repositories are further discussed, including the selecting and entrusting of repository managers, coordinating and monitoring their preservation ingest, planning and management, and provision of public services, and evaluating operations and management soundness, for openly verifiable and collaboratively manageable repository network; Integration of the national STM digital preservation system into the national science and technology infrastructure (NSTI) is discussed, including incorporating digital preservation into NSTI strategy and policy framework, organizing preservation repositories as part of NSTI services, coordinating preservations of STM publications with preservation efforts of other scientific resources (such as scientific data), and very importantly, channel NSTI funding into development and maintenance of the national STM preservation network.
keywords: göttingen