Portico is pleased to announce the University Library of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, as its 1,000th participating library.

Since its inception in 2006, libraries have relied on Portico to preserve academic e-journals, e-books, and other digital scholarship, and ensure that it remains available for future generations.

The University Library of Erlangen-Nuremberg joined alongside 53 other German institutions following an exhaustive evaluation funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), which recommended participation in Portico as part of their national strategy for digital preservation of licensed content.

“Our scientists often ask us how sustainable the library’s investment in digital media is. Portico is a key element in our archiving strategy” said Library Director Konstanze Söllner.

“We are very pleased to have reached this important milestone. To have over 1,000 libraries around the world as Portico participants demonstrates the community’s commitment to protecting the scholarly record in the rapidly evolving digital environment, and represents a tremendous affirmation of the importance of our work,” said Kate Wittenberg, Managing Director of Portico.

Increasingly, library consortia around the world have turned to Portico as part of a national digital preservation strategy. Portico is supported by CAPES in Brazil, SURFMarket in the Netherlands, the Conference of Italian University Rectors (CRUI), b-on in Portugal, the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries, MINCYT in Argentina, and dozens of other consortia and university systems around the world.

Several of Portico’s earliest supporters took the occasion to reflect on Portico’s growth over the last decade, and the increasing awareness of the importance of digital preservation:

Dr. Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost (UCL Library Services), said, “In a digital world, the serious user needs to be sure that the materials they access today will be available tomorrow. Portico has become a global trusted service that fills such a need: long-term access to resources is a key part of the digital infrastructure of the 21st century.”

“As Monash University began the migration from print to electronic resources, we were aware that ensuring the continuity of the scholarly record was crucial, but not something we could do alone. Portico helped assure us that we could continue to meet our obligations for long term sustainability, and we are pleased to see that so many other universities have joined us in this mission,” said Cathrine Harboe-Ree, University Librarian at Monash University in Australia.

“We consider Portico to be a vital component of our licensed content portfolio,” said Ivy Anderson, Associate Executive Director of the California Digital Library. “Archival rights are meaningless without a trusted archive to back them up – Portico gives us that assurance, and occupies a special place in the scholarly ecosystem as a community resource that holds valuable content in trust for the academic community.”

Elenara Almeida, General Coordinator of the CAPES consortium in Brazil, said, “This achievement is a reflection of Portico´s great efforts to serve the academic community in preserving scholarly literature not only in Latin America, but all over the world.”

In addition to growing library participation, Portico has been able to make great strides in both participating publishers as well as the amount of electronic scholarship it preserves.

Last year, Portico announced that its archive had exceeded 1 billion preserved files. For more information, visit www.portico.org.