• About Portico
  • Why Archive?
  • Sustaining the Archive
  • Archival Approach
  • In the Community
  • Advisory Committee
  • Participating Publishers
  • Participating Libraries
  • Committed Journal Titles
  • Preserving Scholarship Together
• For Publishers
• For Libraries
• News and Resources
• Contact Us
• Auditor Archive
• Access Archive

Key Archival Terms

Electronic Scholarly Journals

Electronic scholarly journals are peer-reviewed journals that may be published in electronic form only or may have both print and electronic editions.

Migration

Portico's primary preservation methodology is migration, which involves transitioning content from one file format to another as technology evolves and file formats become obsolete. Two other common preservation strategies include emulation, which involves strategies to make future technology mimic technology of earlier generations, and byte preservation, which involves simple storage of an unmodified stream of digital bytes without special provision for future display or functionality.

Perpetual Access or Post-cancellation Access

Both publishers and libraries have recognized that in some cases, even after a library has terminated a license to an electronic resource, it may be necessary for that library to continue to have ongoing access, which is commonly known as perpetual access or post-cancellation access. A publisher may choose to extend perpetual access to a library under terms that the library finds acceptable, and that access can be provided through the Portico archive if the publisher desires.

Source Files

Publishers submit to Portico source files, which are electronic files containing graphics, text, or other material that comprise an electronic journal article, issue, or volume. Source files may differ from files presented online most typically by including more information or higher quality graphics.

Trigger Event

Campus-wide access to archived content will be granted to libraries supporting Portico when specific conditions are met that cause titles to no longer be available from the publisher or any other source. These specific conditions are often called trigger events and include:

• A publisher stops operations, or
• A publisher ceases to publish a title, or
• A publisher no longer offers back issues, or
• Upon catastrophic and sustained failure of a publisher's delivery platform.

For more information about the titles that have been triggered by Portico please see Recent Trigger Event News.

Last updated on July 9, 2008