There appear to be a number of problems with the electronic media that folks are still wrestling with.
This is really more an issue for university libraries and such but many professional journals are going on line and are only available through a subscription service. If a college or university subscribed to a journal in print form, it would become part of their collection and available as a hard copy to anyone that wanted to view it. However, now that some journals are only available on line through a subscription, they are only available if you pay for the service. Some schools spend $100,000 or more to subscribe each year to the journal services and most won't let you pick and choose which ones you want - you have to buy their package. And if you don't renew, you lose access to all the journals, not just the year you didn't buy. In addition, we assume that the electronic media is secure but to be honest, this technology is fairly new and relatively untested. I do know that I can't read the disc containing my Thesis because I wrote it on a TRS 80 using a word star program. The only surviving copies are paper (not that it was that important a work). However books have survived for hundreds of years (assuming they are printed on good paper) and minus a few book burnings. The world of research, and library science, is being turned on its head as we change media type. Search engines are very powerful and have greatly added in doing research. The flip side is that it could, in theory, disappear overnight. FYI, Geary .
