FEATURE Preservation
marketing group or legal department.’ To this end, Portico developed guidelines to ease participation and tools for straightforward content deposit; one example includes an export plugin for the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform. ‘It’s rarely the price of preservation for these publishers, it really is just more difficult to ‘reach out’,” adds Wittenberg. “But these organisations evolve and now smaller publishers are increasingly using existing platforms that aggregate many journals, so we’re also receiving their content via [this].’
A different approach But while the likes of Portico and CLOCKKS are dark archives providing long-term preservation services, myriad other organisations are emerging, offering short- term archiving options. A key UK-based player, Arkivum, promises to secure copies of data safely for up to 25 years, which can be quickly accessed, while guaranteeing the stored content is usable in the future. Arkivum span out of the University of Southampton in 2011, and since this time has seen an ever-increasing demand for its services. Today the company stores a dizzying array of content for organisations in higher education as well as healthcare, life sciences and heritage. Key contracts come from JISC,
Ex Libris update
Late last year US-based aggregator, ProQuest, acquired Ex Libris, a provider of cloud-based solutions for higher education. The digital preservation system, Rosetta, forms a key part of Ex Libris’s suite library resource tools, but as such, the librarians and publishers can expect business as usual from the company.
‘There is no impact on Rosetta following the acquisition by ProQuest,’ asserts Adi Alter, Rosetta product manager. ‘We have a wider horizon of opportunities resulting from the merger, and will be investigating ways to enhance the system, based on expertise drawn from ProQuest.’ According to Adi Alter, in the run-up to the acquisition Rosetta experienced significant growth,
particularly from the academic community. As he points out, the range of collection types being preserved by insitutions is vast, covering both digitally-born and digitised content.
‘Recently we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the demand to preserve more complex content types, such as web content and scholarly research data,’ he adds.
Indeed the company recently clinched deals with China-based Shanghai University and US-based academic libraries consortium, Ohio-Link to preserve a complex range of content.
For example OhioLink’s content includes its electronic journal collection, with tens of millions of digital files, as well as its electronic dissertations and theses covering
10 Research Information FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016
tens of thousands of records. Electronics books are included, as are hundreds of thousands of video, image and audio files from the digital resources collection. ‘Rosetta will provide a digital repository backbone that will serve the digital asset management and preservation needs of the different libraries in the consortium,’ says Alter. ‘One challenge is to build different workflows for the evolving collections. OhioLINK will take advantage of Rosetta being a flexible and fully- configurable system.’
Alter also asserts that Shanghai Library selected Rosetta for digital asset management and preservation, and multi-language support.
‘[The system] copes with
and many UK-based universities, as well as the New York Museum of Modern Art, The Tate Gallery, North Bristol NHS Trust and Royal Botanic Gardens.
‘The data types within our service are hugely varied, including genomic data, medical imaging, research data from
Myriad other organisations are emerging, offering short- term archiving options
universities and even call recordings from call centres,’ says Matthew Addis, chief technology officer at Arkivum. ‘We also quite often integrate our archiving solution with, say, a university institutional repository – and it could be a data publication platform, such as Figshare.’
Addis spent more than a decade carrying out research on digital preservation and archiving at the University of Southampton, before joining Arkivum. As he highlights, the company receives a lot of interest in its archiving services, following what he calls a ‘compelling event’. For example, the company saw a lot of activity in the run up to the last year’s
deadline for the EPSRC policy framework on research data. “Many universities realised they had a deadline and opted for an ‘out-of-the-box’, ready to go solution, so this kind of thing really catalyses demand,” he says.
‘As part of the 100,000 Genomic Project we also see UK government pushing for 100,000 people to have their genomes sequenced over the next couple of years,’ he adds. ‘It’s this rapid increase in data that causes all hell to break loose with people thinking ‘right, we’ve got to take action’.’ Like many in the industry, Addis see many issues surrounding storing complex content – for example, handling different file formats and dealing with meta data. But what he asserts is most crucial, is to actually get started.
‘I’ve heard Tim Gollins, head of digital archiving at National Records of Scotland, say: “You can think about all the risks and complex challenges, but unless you’ve captured the data, you’ve got no hope of preserving it”,’ he laughs.
‘For me, the key challenge is knowing where to start and to keep things simple,’ he says. ‘There are possibly too many people spending too much time thinking about the problem without making any short-term decision to get on and make progress.’
diverse content types via plug-ins, which enable the management, preservation and delivery of almost any content,’ he says. ‘The language needs of Shanghai are easily met by Unicode and its interface can be translated into any language.’
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