Preservation of Chinese Print Astronomical Literature in the Digital and Network Age

摘要

Over the last few decades, more and more journals and books have been published in both electronic and print formats. Some journals have been digitized retrospectively going back to the first volume of more than a hundred years ago,which benefits researchers and librarians tremendously. As a result, many librarians subscribe to books and journals in both electronic and print versions when possible. In many cases, because of budget shortfalls and the low usage of print materials, many libraries have started to order electronic only. This trend heralds a potential demise of print literature as major library resources and has implications for the library services associated with them. This paper proposes some opinions on this issue. We believe that the librarians should pay attention to and conserve the published astronomical literature, a precious historical and cultural heritage, so that we could hand it down to future generations, just like our predecessors did for us.