Building archives in the virtual observatory era

Broad support for Virtual Observatory (VO) standards by astronomical archives is critical for the success of the VO as a research platform. Indeed, a number of effective data discovery, visualization, and integration tools have been created which rely on this broad support. Thus, to an archive, the motivation for supporting VO standards is strong. However, we are now seeing a growing trend among archive developers towards leveraging VO standards and technologies not just to provide interoperability with the VO, but also to support an archive's internal needs and the needs of the archive's primary user base. We examine the motivation for choosing VO technologies for implementing an archive's functionality and list several current examples, including from the Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA HEASARC, NOAO, and NRAO. We will also speculate on the effect that VO will have on some of the ambitious observatory projects planned for the near future.