Digital libraries: Israel set to open first digital archive of Hebrew academic journals

In the coming months, back issues of 60 Hebrew-language research journals will be scanned into an online archive that will be accessible to professors and students both in Israel and abroad.

The archive, the first of its kind in Israel, will later be opened to the general public as well.

The project received a boost a few days ago when the Council for Higher Education's Planning and Budgeting Committee agreed to contribute funding.

The digitization will be carried out by the Jewish National and University Library and the University of Haifa library, in conjunction with the online archive site JSTOR, which will store the new archive. Currently, JSTOR maintains online archives for at least 1,000 academic journals and sells them to more than 4,000 institutions worldwide.

However, stressed national library CEO Oren Weinberg, the archive will not include recent issues of the digitized journals, so as not to hurt the publishers' revenues. "There will be an embargo of three to five years, depending on what the journals themselves decide," he said.