Within the last few decades, there have been many new developments and challenges in the information industry and information services sector. Consequently, information management activities, and the corresponding professional and research skills, had to change and adapt continuously to changing information and communication technologies (ICTs) and global developments. Contrary to the old practices where information professionals had to play the role of an intermediary between content users and content producers, primarily commercial content providers, modern-day information professionals need to play a whole range of new roles comprising a number of different functions and activities. Such new roles and responsibilities include facilitating access to relevant information that is available through a multitude of services and platforms, creating and managing specific content and data services in the form of institutional repositories and open access digital libraries, preserving content to ensure future access, managing user-generated content, and so on. Modern information managers who use emerging web and social networking technologies to gather more user and usage data, in order to provide the best possible services to the user community, require a variety of new skills to link commercial, open access and user-generated content and data within specific contexts.

The rapidly changing scenario in the information industry and marketplace – the increasing volume of scholarly information resources vis-à-vis increasing user demands, increasing competition from a variety of new web-based information systems and services, fast changing technologies and new government regulations – raise several questions:

• • How sustainable are today's information systems and services?

• • How can we ensure the sustainability of information throughout its lifetime – from its generation to management and use?

• • Can today's information systems and services face the new economic challenges and yet maintain the quality of their services in order to provide easy and equitable access to information to everyone?

• • Can the level and quality of information services be sustained over a long period of time?

• • Can all these activities be performed in an environment-friendly manner so that an ecological balance can be maintained?

This book aims to find answers to some of these sustainability questions especially in the context of scholarly information systems and services. It argues that in order to build sustainable digital information systems and services, it is necessary to identify the challenges associated with the design, delivery, access, use and preservation of digital information.