I was really pleased to read on David Mattison’s The Ten Thousand Year Blog that articles published in the Association of Canadian Archivists’ journal Archivaria are now available online. The journal started in 1975 and all the articles published between then and the Spring 2002 issue are now freely available in PDF form. More recent issues are reserved for members of the association. That’s fair enough, though five years seems to me rather a long time to keep that content privileged.

Wouldn’t it be good if back issues of the Journal of the Society of Archivists could be made freely available in the same way? Journal articles are available through Taylor and Francis online, but only if you (or your institution) pay a subscription (over and above the subscription that members pay for the hard copy). These articles only go back to 1999, while the journal has been published since 1955.