The Research Library as Digital Curator at Virginia Tech

Research libraries provide a significant portion of the open access materials available on the Internet, and an examination of the efforts of one such library will illustrate the role of these institutions in creating the current information environment. The Virginia Tech University Libraries established the Scholarly Communications Project (SCP) even before the Gopher protocol opened up databases housed at research libraries to librarians with Internet access. The SCP was primarily intended to take advantage of evolving technologies to produce and distribute academic journals without the costs associated with traditional publishing, and that journal archive, the EJournals, is still at the heart of what has become the Digital Library and Archives (DLA).