Libraries around the world are moving rapidly to holding digital collections, but will all those bits and bytes be here in the future? ITHAKA, a not-for-profit leader in developing new solutions to advance and preserve knowledge, is making sure the answer to that question is yes. Today the organization announced that its large-scale digital preservation service Portico now preserves one billion files or, in practical terms, more than 20,000 e-journals, 400,000 e-books, and 600 million images that include vast collections of historical newspapers.

Portico has nearly doubled the amount of content it preserves in the past year, representing the ingestion of more than 24 million files per month into the archive, and pushing it over the one billion mark.

“Our growth is largely due to improvements in production efficiency and capacity as well as the trust that publishers large and small have in us to preserve and protect their content,” noted Kate Wittenberg, Portico managing director. “Massive collections from publishers such as Gale Cengage brought in more than 100 terabytes of content in 2015 alone. And smaller publishers who are most at risk for no longer being able to provide access to their content in the future—those publishing 10 titles or fewer—are joining Portico to ensure their work survives long into the future.”

Portico has also expanded its services and the files it archives by working with libraries with special mandates and obligations to preserve content. Both the British Library and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek are partnering with Portico to meet commitments to preserve academic content. Additionally, Portico is working with fellow-ITHAKA service, the digital library JSTOR, to preserve the 70 million pages of journal content it has digitized and brought online.

“Digital preservation is a massive challenge that cannot be solved by any single library,” said Robert Wolven, Associate University Librarian for Bibliographic Services and Collection Development, Columbia University Libraries. “Portico gives us a way to act collectively on our preservation mission to ensure that our intellectual history will be accessible to future generations 50 or 100 years from now.”