BackTalk: Who's Going To Preserve E-Zine Content?

Whenever I send out my e-zine, ExLibris, to subscribers, I always include the "permanent" URL for that particular issue. But what, exactly, do we who create e-zines mean when we say "permanent"? Just how much of a promise does that word hold? The answer is, not much.

Mine is one of many librarian-created electronic zines and journals and mailing lists. Some, like D-Lib (www.dlib.org) and InCite (www.alia.org.au/incite), are sponsored by professional associations. Others, like LLRX (llrx.com), for law librarians, and FreePint (www.freepint.com/index.html), a British forum for information professionals, are commercial sites that offer a mix of free articles and paid services. Presumably their associations and businesses have the means to keep their archives available if publication ceases. But there are many other magazines like Ex Libris that are published by lone librarians and without institutional support. Among these are Rory Litwin's progressive Library Juice (www.libr.org/Juice), Bruce Jensen's useful SOL: Spanish in Our Libraries (www.sol-plus.net/index.htm), and Walt Crawford's opinionated Cites & Insights (cical.home.att.net/index.html ).

The survival of these publications, and their archives, depends entirely on each founder's ongoing ability and will to spend the money for server costs and domain name registration. This means that when we stop publishing and give up our web sites, our archives will vanish. A lot of valuable information is at risk, content specifically aimed at the very professionals who invented the concepts of archiving and indexing.

Some zines and e-journals are primary resources on their topics. Others are agenda-setting publications on issues the profession needs to think about. We know we're hitting a nerve because we track our use statistics and subscriber numbers. We know that hundreds of other library web sites link to our zines and journals. When we see our online articles on required reading lists in LIS courses, we know that our ideas are influencing the shape of librarianship.

We also know how important these electronic zines and journals are because our own professional reading habits have changed. Like many librarians, I start each weekday morning visiting about two dozen librarian zines, blogs, and journals. They are my filters. In them, people I trust help me figure out to which new technologies, databases, and web sites I should pay attention. Of course, as with print publications, some of what we publish online is ephemeral. Libraries and the Internet are changing at warp speed, and some things that sound really good will lose relevance over time.

All the same, online zines and journals are as much part of the historical record as print publications, but they exist on an entirely separate playing field. Print publications are bound and preserved by subscribing libraries. Their content is often digitized, licensed, and made available, full text, with keyword indexing, in electronic databases like Library Literature. OCLC even guarantees the permanence of its archives of Electronic Collections Online, promising to migrate the data to new formats if needed. In contrast, zines' content is archived on a hit or miss basis, and it is accessed by keyword through Google or Eric Lease Morgan's useful index, Index Morganagus (sunsite.berkeley.edu/~emorgan/morganagus). Thus, librarians must look for library literature in two places, on the web and in licensed databases, because each only partially represents the spectrum.

The archiving situation can be solved by way of the web. Walt Crawford is spearheading the Coalition of Web-based Library-Related Zines/Newsletters (COWLZ), an organization and discussion list that seeks to provide permanent storage and access for e-zine content. The membership, which is still working out collection guidelines, currently includes zine publishers and some serials librarians as well.

However, the aggregating issue will not be solved so simply. Full-text database providers serving libraries should be negotiating with e-zine publishers to archive this vital content and index it right along with the other publications they offer full text. This would make their databases more complete, accurately reflecting the full range of publishing on current issues. It would serve their mission of keeping valuable content from disappearing forever.

As far back as 1996, Barbara Quint of Information Today suggested that archiving vital but ephemeral web site content had great profit potential for database vendors, that the way to deal with the threat of free information on the net was to incorporate it into their databases. Of course, database vendors are in business to make profits. Each title indexed costs them money, and they add titles when their customers demand it. So, it's really up to all of us. Do we want one-stop shopping for our library literature? If so, we need to tell our database vendors we want them to archive and index back files of important library-related e-zines and journals.