FEATURE
Digital Preservation Store for safekeeping
The path to digital preservation has been peppered with problems, but progress has been rapid, reports Rebecca Pool
Digital preservation is helping to save and make available vast amounts of scholarly resources in places such as the British Library
to fund them anyway. Doubts over publisher willingness to deposit journals content twinned with confusion over how libraries would access it didn’t help and, crucially, how would you encourage publishers and libraries to actually come forward and cooperate? ‘Existing market mechanisms had failed to produce a preservation approach that
T 12 Research Information OCT/NOV 2011
en years ago, many in scholarly publishing worried about digital preservation, but didn’t know what to do. Preservation solutions were nigh on non-existent and nobody knew how
garnered the support of a wide range of publishers and libraries,’ explains Eileen Fenton, who was managing director of Portico, one of several organisations now providing digital preservation services for the academic community. ‘The infrastructure required for digital preservation is extensive and carries significant costs; both publishers and libraries had to invest in the solution to make it sustainable.’ With this in mind, Portico adopted a not-
for-profit approach and set about working with publishers and libraries to understand
technology and business issues. Publishers were required to hand over preservation rights while appropriate library access to archived content was agreed. ‘We took an approach that we believed balanced the needs of libraries and publishers,’ recalls Fenton. ‘We decided that access to content would only be gained under special circumstances, so-called trigger events, and participating libraries could visit our audit site for verification purposes. Both libraries and publishers [make] an annual payment to the preservation services with access provided to those that contribute.’ Nearly 10 years on from the creation of Portico, the not-for-profit model is working. The organisation has more than 700 supporting libraries and 130 participating publishers and the content that it preserves has extended beyond journals to e-books and other scholarly content. Another approach to preservation, the Stanford Universities-based LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) project, which began being deployed in 2000, uses open-source software to detect and store participating publishers’ content on computer networks at hundreds of libraries worldwide. Likewise, CLOCKSS, a spin-out project for triggered content, now has around 140 libraries archiving content from nearly 50 publishers. There are many preservation initiatives
from national libraries such as Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands and The British Library too. As Portico’s present managing director,
Kate Wittenberg, says: ‘We believe that [the amount of competition] is a sign of a continuing need in the community, and is evidence of a robust market for preservation.’
Archiving challenges Robust or not, digital preservation still has challenges. In May 2008, the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) released its ‘Comparative study of e-journal archiving solutions’, concluding: ‘None
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British Library
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