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Preservation FEATURE


the archives,’ she adds. ‘Signing EBSCO was a massive deal that sparked considerable interest in the library community... and we will now be going out to talk to other potential D-Collection partners.’ In a similar vein, CLOCKSS anticipates demand for its preservation services from aggregators. Van Dyck asserts: ‘I’m expecting that in 2016 we will see some very large collections coming to us from aggregators.’ ‘Right now, the CLOCKSS software and hardware systems are being prepared for very significant growth from D-Collections and back files,’ he adds. ‘We also expect more supplementary material from journals, including videos, which will all add to capacity requirements, so we’re making long-term investments this year.’ Indeed, part of CLOCKSS’ longer-term masterplan includes participating in the broader world of digital preservation. As Van Dyck puts it: ‘Digital preservation is of interest in libraries worldwide, and while scholarly literature is our core competency, it is not the entire realm of digital preservation. We will be collaborating with industry leaders worldwide to improve digital preservation infrastructure.’ ‘[With LOCKSS], we are in the process of recrafting our technology to be more modular, and are taking advantage of the many open source components that are available,’ he adds. ‘Developers of LOCKSS are collaborating with other developers across the entire industry and we also want to be in a position to take advantage of that.’


Complex and dynamic Unsurprisingly, the preservation of dynamic content is still throwing up issues as the technologies Web 2.0 and HTML5 give way to more complex, changing content. Typical examples include databases and encyclopedia structures that are being updated, and organisations across the board are developing strategies to deal with this. Indeed, for several years now, LOCKKS, as used by CLOCKSS, has been working on how best to deal with this constantly moving target. For example, open-source software has been released to capture content that had been locked behind inaccessible forms, while code has also been developed to collect materials delivered via Javascript. But, as Van Dyck candidly admits:


www.researchinformation.info @researchinfo


Historical newpapers can be viewed within Ex Libris’ Rosetta digital preservation system


‘Thanks to a Mellon grant, LOCKSS has definitely addressed methods to capture content in more dynamic formats including HTML5 and AJAX, but the process is still not seamless.’ ‘From CLOCKSS point of view, we can take snapshots [of captured content], so if a customer was to say we want to preserve a database that is ever-changing, we would say fine, but we need to agree on periodic snapshots,’ he adds. ‘If that was acceptable, great.’


Right now, Portico is also working on dynamic content. Last year, the organisation signed an agreement to preserve Harvard


‘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.’ Arkivum’s Mark Addis


University Press’s Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), which includes dynamic content such as audio recordings and mapping tools.


‘This has been fascinating; the interface is a map that you click on to get an audio recording of the regional language accent for that location,’ says Wittenberg. Indeed, the managing director expects to see more of the same over the next five years. As she points out, publishers are


handling more distributed, dynamic objects as part of their publications with content increasingly based on data rather than text, so establishing the best preservation approach will be crucial.


‘Publications could be driven by a database with a dynamic interface; this may have links to datasets that reside outside the article, or even multimedia collections that are central to the author’s argument,’ she says. ‘We’re starting to see a trickle of these but my feeling is we’ll see a lot more in the next several years, and preservation services need to be responsive to that.’ Dynamic content aside, drawing in content from small publishers has also vexed preservation organisations for several years. Referred to as the ‘long tail’ of small publishers, this content is less straightforward and more expensive to preserve, and therefore more at risk. However, for its part, CLOCKSS, together with LOCKSS, has been very active in addressing this long tail. As Van Dyck points out: ‘These [smaller organisations] come to us directly now, and we saw a good slice of our growth driven by smaller publishers in 2015, many of whom were open-access publishers.’ According to Wittenberg, Portico has also seen success in attracting smaller publishers, with around half of its journals coming from this sector. Classing these organisations as publishers that produce at most, 10 titles, recent signings include Pacific University Libraries, US, Methaodos Revista de Ciencias Sociales, Spain, and Hygeia Press, Italy. ‘It’s very difficult to contact these small publishers,’ highlights Wittenberg. ‘The publication could be run by a faculty member, a graduate student or an academic department that doesn’t, for example, have a


FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016 Research Information 9


Ex Libris


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