Kate Wittenberg Managing director, Portico, USA
Unesco and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) published an Executive Guide on Digital Preservation in May last year. In your opinion, what are the challenges of international co-operation on digital preservation? How can digital preservation programmes be more inclusive? International co-operation in digital preservation can be challenging due to the differences in policies, laws, and approaches in various countries. However, there are examples of effective international collaborations that have contributed to progress in this area. Some countries have established national legal deposit legislation and have engaged in international partnerships to make progress in this area. For example, Portico works with the British Library (BL) to support its legal deposit programme. Since the start of the engagement in April 2013, Portico has delivered more than 6.5 million articles, which the BL is processing, preserving, and delivering to the other UK deposit libraries and to the BL’s reading rooms for use by patrons on a daily basis. Another example of international
collaboration on preservation is Portico’s partnership with the National Library of the Netherlands (KB). For more than ten years, Portico and the KB have collaborated in jointly formulating our respective institutions’ understanding and implementation of the principles, practices, procedures and technologies for preservation. As part of this collaboration, we have established an online replica of the Portico archive in the KB, an arrangement that contributes to the safety of Portico’s archive and which aligns with the mission of the KB to preserve the scholarly record.
The DPC’s BitList provides an overview of digital content that is important to preserve. How does your archive contribute to the preservation of endangered content? Portico is committed to preserving the electronic records of scholarly materials for the benefit of the academic community and its future researchers and students. Our focus is preserving the files provided to us by the publishers and other content
www.researchinformation.info | @researchinfo
providers with whom we have agreements. We maintain a format registry that is updated as needed to include format types; all files with an identified format type are fully preserved. If we receive files in a format that
cannot be identified, those files are byte preserved. While we are certainly preserving content types that are included on BitList, such as PDF/A, published research articles, and video files, the lens through which we identify endangered content is typically one concerned with whether publications or products are sustainable. For example, the long tail of small OA journals are more at risk than those titles supported by larger publishing operations. We are also researching ways in which
to properly preserve non-traditional forms of scholarship, such as dynamic and interactive works, which are otherwise at risk of becoming unusable in the future. An example of this is our participation in a Mellon-funded grant project at New York University – Enhancing Services to Preserve New Forms of Digital Scholarship.
“We are also researching ways in which to
properly preserve non-traditional forms of
scholarship”
It is important to validate good practices in the field of digital archiving and several certifications exist, such as TRAC metrics, CoreTrustSeal, Nestor Seal for Trustworthy Digital Archives. Should certification be made compulsory at the national, or even international level? We believe that standards and requirements for certification should be addressed on a country-by-country, or even sector-by-sector basis.
•
The OAIS standard is the cornerstone for electronic archiving. Are there other recommendations or standards that are particularly important and is your organisation implementing them? Portico preserves journals, books, standards, digitised historic collections, and, more recently, database-like reference works. In our sector, the following standards are in common use: •
Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS),
https://www.loc.gov/standards/ mets/, is a standard for encoding metadata about preserved objects. Portico does not internally use METS, but we can export to it.
•
Dublin Core,
https://dublincore.org/ specifications/dublin-core/, is a set of vocabulary terms that can be used to describe objects. Portico applies the 15 properties in the elements namespace to every item preserved.
Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS),
https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/, and its Book Interchange Tag Suite (BITS) and NISO Standards Tag Suite (NISO-STS) extensions are commonly used by Portico and others as XML formats.
• The PREMIS Data Dictionary,
https://www.loc.gov/standards/ premis/, captures objects, events, agents and rights about preserved objects. Portico’s preservation metadata is informed by PREMIS and we can export to it.
•
The BagIt File Packaging Format,
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc8493.txt, describes a file layout convention for the storage and transfer of digital content. Portico uses BagIt extensively within the archive for transferring content.
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