The Portico digital preservation service is developing a pilot project to include in our dark archive important under-represented content that may be at-risk because it is not preserved. For this project, we define under-represented content as material concerning people, communities, or topics that have had inadequate representation in traditional publishing, library and archival collections, and preservation services and that may therefore be at risk over the long term.

At Portico, we want to be able to provide the resources and expertise necessary to make important under-represented content safe and available for future generations for educational and research purposes. The goal of this pilot project is to understand more about the challenges involved in identifying this content, the resources required to preserve it in terms of community trust, staff time, expertise required for digital preservation processing and to handle a variety of formats, storage needs, and rights and privacy issues, and to determine whether we can expand this pilot project into a sustainable service offering for the community. To succeed, we need to identify at-risk material, create a sustainable and scalable system for preserving it, and make sure that its producers can trust that their content will be cared for with respect, attention, and long-term commitment.

As we work with a variety of partners during this pilot, we will increase our capacity to support this work by developing efficient processes for the preservation of these important collections. This will enable us to offer this service to an increasing number of archives.

Our current partners include:

  • Ozarks Afro American Heritage Museum Online
  • Bracero History Archive
  • Pilbara Aboriginal Strike
  • Against All Odds – The First Black Legislators in Mississippi
  • Emmett Till Memory Project
  • Digital Transgender Archive
  • Invisible Histories Project

If you’d like to read more about the project, Library Journal wrote an article about our work on the pilot, and JSTOR Daily published an interview with one of our pilot participants–the Digital Transgender Archive. We look forward to adding new partners to this project and invite people to connect with us if they have suggestions.