Research Library Associations Commit to the Future of the Digital Scholarly Record

The International Alliance of Research Library Associations (IARLA) — a global coalition of several major research and academic library associations in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States — recognises the significance of preservation of the scholarly record.

IARLA fully endorses Working Together to Ensure the Future of the Digital Scholarly Record – a statement by The Keepers Registry, a Jisc-funded service maintained by EDINA and the ISSN International Centre, that outlines the actions now required to tackle the evolving challenges of preserving and ensuring the long term accessibility of digital scholarship.

The statement sets out a series of recommended activities for publishers, research libraries and national libraries that can be undertaken to support archiving and preservation initiatives.

IARLA’s endorsement demonstrates a consensus that collaboration will promote and enable efficient use of limited resources and increase awareness of this significant challenge. We declare our commitment to the necessary ‘concerted, coordinated and sustained action’. For its part, IARLA commits to promoting awareness of the issues and to fostering and supporting actions among our member libraries such as:

• Using expertise to identify important titles and classes of content at risk of loss, and to help prioritise the preservation of that content;
• Ensuring that any journals that our universities publish are archived;
• Discussing preservation during subscription negotiations with publishers.

As research library associations, we recognise that the preservation and long-term accessibility of the digital scholarly record and of other parts of a country’s published heritage are essential for scholarship.