FEATURE Preservation Preserving
As preservation professionals meet the rising demands of traditional publishers, can they also attend to the needs of riskier ventures, asks Rebecca Pool
s electronic publishing surges ahead, preservation initiatives are experiencing very strong growth. Global archive, CLOCKSS, for example, has yet again added more than fifty publishers and doubled the number of libraries to its roll call while late last year Portico celebrated preserving a hefty 25 million journal articles.
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And the rise is content agnostic. Despite its e-journal milestone, Portico managing director, Kate Wittenberg, claims equally healthy growth from e-books. ‘We are still seeing a continuing large-scale flow of e-books as publishers and libraries increasingly accept the fact that books are becoming digital,’ she says.
Likewise, Randy S Kiefer, executive director of CLOCKSS, confirms a steady increase in demand for e-journal and e-book preservation. ‘When CLOCKSS started it was focused on academic journals but we also have very strong growth [in e-books].’
Kiefer describes the not-for-profit organisation’s e-book preservation services as ‘plain vanilla’. CLOCKSS currently captures and preserves standard listings because more dynamic content, such as online commentary to editor’s notes, either doesn’t exist or isn’t yet digitised. But this will change. ‘The e-books business is evolving,’ he says. ‘E-books are not yet geared to capture dynamic content and I think it’s going to be another two to three years before the style and type of business settles down.’
16 Research Information FEBRUARY/MARCH 2014
In the meantime, preserving dynamic content is still throwing up issues. Kiefer notes that dynamic content is difficult for dark archives such as CLOCKSS to preserve as, put simply, dynamic content changes from moment to moment. ‘Most [dark archives] take snapshots over time with the goal of preserving the wide majority of content in the way it was presented,’ he says. ‘We’re getting better at taking good snapshots and getting a sense of when is the optimal time to capture that content.’ Crucially, new tools are also being developed to preserve dynamic content better. For example, LOCKSS, an open-source, digital preservation initiative based at Stanford University and used by CLOCKSS, has released open-source software to capture content that was previously locked behind inaccessible forms. What’s more, the initiative is also working on code to collect materials delivered via Javascript.
At the same time, Portico continues to research new methods to connect data to publications. However, Wittenberg highlights how the organisation still needs publishers to provide new kinds of dynamic content to work with.
The organisation has access to complex content, such as
audio-visual materials from its digitised historical collections preservation
As researchers in developing nations publish more papers, AJOL is providing much-needed hosting and preservation services
service. But as the Portico managing director adds: ‘I haven’t seen anyone come to us with a giant dataset and say “I need to work out how to preserve large executable files”. We assume this is coming, but we haven’t had to deal with it yet.’
Preservation developments As each preservation organisation continues to grapple with dynamic content challenges, it is also eyeing new developments. One key example is the slow but steady demand for preservation from developing nations. CLOCKSS, for example, recently signed a contract with the University of Guam, located on the island of Guam in the Western Pacific Ocean, to preserve its e-journal, Micronesica. The organisation also has agreements with Brazilian government education agency, CAPES; the Brazilian scientific journals e-library, SciELO; the Autonomous University of Mexico; and is making in-roads into India.
‘Publishers in India are very print centric with business models at least a decade behind the USA and Europe,’ says Kiefer. ‘But we’re close to signing a large publisher and have already signed an open-access publisher here. And I’ve also signed a couple of libraries; as this group expands, more will join.’ But despite CLOCKSS’ success, preservation
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