FEATURE Preservation
The rise and rise of digital preservation
As the demand sky- rockets, industry players are juggling dynamic content, D-Collections and more, writes Rebecca Pool
W
hile digital preservation was once considered to be a ticking time-bomb for libraries worldwide, today myriad organisations and
initiatives exist, ready and willing to archive content for both the short- and long-term. US-based not-for-profit preservation archive, Portico, is a front-runner in academic preservation and, like many in the industry, continues to see rising demand for services. Recent contracts to preserve e-journals and e-books come from India- based Environ Researchers and Emerald Publishing, UK. As managing director, Kate Wittenberg highlights: ‘The amount that we ingest into the archive just continues to grow every year. ‘We’ve just celebrated one billion files in our archives and I find it astounding how much growth we see; we have to increase our storage capacity because demand is growing so quickly.’ Likewise, not-for-profit venture,
CLOCKSS, US, has also seen a steady stream of both e-journals and e-books deposited into its internationally distributed network of archives. CLOCKSS uses an open source digital preservation system – LOCKSS – developed at Stanford University, US, and this year, has signed key contracts with Cambridge University Press, Emerald Group Publishing and IOPP
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Publishing, UK. ‘We’ve seen a realisation among libraries and publishers in 2015 that it is now important to preserve books as well as journals,’ comments executive director Craig Van Dyck. Wittenberg agrees, saying: ‘E-books are not as fast-moving as e-journals at this point, as [this sector] is in an earlier stage of development compared to e-journal publishing programmes.
‘But we continue to sign new e-books... and in many cases this is from journal publishers that realise they need preservation and are now also turning to their e-book programmes,’ she adds. However, for Wittenberg and Portico, another important source of demand for preservation is now gathering momentum. While e-journal and e-book titles still provide the mainstay of growth for the company, digitised historical collections are fuelling business more and more. In early January 2014, Portico had extended an already established partnership
with US-based aggregator, Gale, to preserve all digital collections in its D-Collection Preservation Service. Content is estimated to total at least 1.5 million documents across more than 150 million pages. But late last year, a further contract came through for the same function, this time from EBSCO Information Services. The US-based discovery service provider and aggregator launched its Digital Archives in 2009, and has now enlisted Portico to ensure long-term availability of content such as Civil War Primary Source Documents and African American Historical Serials. As Wittenberg points out: ‘We have been working on this complex arrangement for a very long time and, combined with Gale, it represents a very big jump in the amount of content in our D-Collection Service.’ ‘These are huge [collections] and take up a large percentage of our physical space in
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