EMANI – A Project for the Long-Term Preservation of Electronic Publications in Mathematics

Abstract

With the rapidly growing activities in electronic publishing ideas came up to install global repositories, which deal with three mainstreams in this enterprise: storing the electronic material currently available, pursuing projects to solve the long-term archiving problem for this material with the ambition to preserve the content in readable form for future generations, and to capture the printed literature in digital versions providing good access and search facilities for the readers. Long-term availability of published research articles in mathematics and easy access to them is a strong need for researchers working with mathematics. Hence in this domain some pioneering projects have been established trying to tackle the above-mentioned problems.

The article will describe some of these activities and touch the plan to develop a global Digital Mathematical Library (DML). As a special project for mathematics in the archiving area the Electronic Mathematics Archives Network Initiative (EMANI) had been designed. Having in mind that a distributed architecture would be more suitable and reduce the load on the partners for such a project, a network is proposed, which also might be a more open approach for extending the project from a initially restricted solution to a more comprehensive enterprise. For the core of the network, a co-operational system of reference libraries and content providers like publishers and editors has been be set up. On the side of the libraries the following partners have agreed to set up a prototype for the archive: the Tsinghua University Library in Beijing, the Cornell University Library in Ithaca (N.Y.), the French partner MathDoc and the Lower Saxony State and University Library in Göttingen. The first group of content providers consists of the Springer publishing house, associated publishers and journals posted in the Electronic Library of EMIS. This report refers to the state of EMANI after the fourth EMANI workshop in Paris at the beginning of April 2003.