The need to preserve electronic journals is a major concern for library directors, according to research.

A survey of 186 library directors in US universities and colleges found that nearly three-quarters considered it unacceptable to lose access to e-journals permanently, and most (73%) thought their own institution had a responsibility to take action to preserve e-journals.

But only two-thirds of the libraries were involved in e-preservation initiatives. The libraries in research-focused institutions were more likely to be participating in such initiatives than those in teaching institutions.

The survey identified a lack of urgency and a sense of uncertainty as the reason for the mismatch between the high number expressing concern about digital preservation and the low number taking action.

Of those libraries not participating in preservation initiatives, half agreed that the e-preservation landscape was extremely complicated and their library didn’t really understand the options.

The survey was conducted by Portico, a not-for-profit archive of electronic scholarly literature, and Ithaka, an organisation promoting the use of technology in higher education.

Eileen Fenton, executive director or Portico, said digital preservation had been “of long-standing concern in the library community”.

She added that e-journals presented a very different challenge from print journals: “Many libraries would subscribe to a physical journal and hold it on their shelves. There are many copies of that physical journal that can be preserved for the long term, so we have a reasonably high assurance that, generations hence, scholars can still get at that content.”

E-journals differed, she said, in that libraries typically licensed them from a publisher, and the content resided on the publisher’s server. Problems could arise if a publisher discontinued a journal or went out of business.

“Publishers have not been charged with keeping things going forever,” she pointed out. “Their job is to publish new articles.”

The advantage of an archive such as Portico, she said, was that it enabled the cost of the preservation infrastructure to be shared, rather than borne by any single institution.