Home > News and Resources > Announcements > July 9, 2008

Portico Moves Beyond E-journals: New Digital Preservation Activities Announced at Third Annual Participants' Meeting

Portico, a not-for-profit digital preservation service, introduced three expansions of its preservation work at its third annual Participants' Meeting, held during the American Library Association Annual Conference in Anaheim, California. In direct response to preservation concerns expressed by libraries and publishers, Portico is moving beyond e-journal preservation.

Portico now preserves scholarly e-books.
At ALA, Elsevier, a leading scientific journal, database and book publisher, announced an agreement to preserve in the Portico archive e-book content available in ScienceDirect. (see http://elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.careers/companynews05_00960). Portico is in active discussions with several other e-book publishers and will announce additional agreements as these are finalized.
Portico has also initiated preservation activities for digitized newspapers. Discussions with a number of leading publishers of current and historical digitized newspapers are underway, and we will keep the community apprised as these move ahead.
Portico also announced a new service to enable libraries to preserve locally created/digitized electronic scholarly materials within the Portico archive. Fifteen institutions have agreed to work with Portico in the introductory phase of this service. These institutions include:
- American University
- Baylor University
- Binghamton University
- Brigham Young University
- California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
- City University of New York
- Colorado State University
- McMaster University
- Middlebury Colleg
- Northwestern University
- Trinity College, Dublin
- University of British Columbia
- University of Notre Dame
- University of Queensland (Australia)
- Vassar College

Portico expects to open this service to interested libraries in mid-2009.

For more than a decade the scholarly community has expressed concerns about preservation, in particular for e-journals, and Portico's digital preservation service was launched in late 2005 in direct response to this need. As new preservation needs are brought to Portico's attention by both libraries and publishers, Portico is working to respond to these needs in ways that allow us to more fully meet our mission to preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that these materials remain accessible to future generations of scholars, researchers and students. Portico's new activities will proceed as preservation of the more than 7,700 journals committed to the Portico archive continues.

To obtain additional information about participation in Portico or about these preservation activities see www.portico.org or send an email to participation@portico.org.

Last updated on July 9, 2008