As we begin a new year, we are pleased to be able to share with you our progress in preserving the content that you have committed to the Portico archive. We very much appreciate the opportunity to work with you to address the need for secure preservation of scholarly resources, and it is our goal to keep you informed about our work and progress.

Portico continues to ingest a growing stream of ejournal, ebook, and digital collection content into the archive and, to that end, the number of “archival units,” or items, (e.g., journal articles, books, newspaper issues, documents) being preserved has grown to 147,793,342, with the number of files being preserved in the Portico archive surpassing 2.67 billion in 2024. With 59 journal publishers, two book publishers, and one digital collection added this past year, we now have a total of 1,181 participating publishers and 1,289 libraries supporting the archive.

In addition to our day-to-day work with publishers’ content, we always look for ways to build on our expertise in preservation to serve the emerging and future needs of our participants and the broader preservation community. Much of our work in 2024, described below, has been focused on preparing for these changing needs and ensuring that Portico remains a stable, innovative, and sustainable service.

Portico’s pilot project to preserve underrepresented voices

 
Portico continues its work on a pilot project to preserve content that is underrepresented in traditional archives and may be at risk because it is not preserved. As part of our efforts to increase the number of collections in this pilot, we recently established a collaboration with CLIR (the Council on Library and Information Resources). They are providing grants to archives through their Digitizing Hidden Collections program, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation. CLIR is connecting us to these archives so we can offer to preserve the digitized material from this grant-funded work.

Portico’s research to preserve complex, non-traditional forms of publication

 
This year Portico is completing its three-year Embedding Preservability for New Forms of Scholarship research. This project focuses on the preservation of complex forms of publication, such as those with embedded audio or video, 3D visualizations, and non-linear modes of navigation. The team is developing a self-assessment tool to support publishers in improving preservability of their complex publications. This tool, along with a report on the project, will be completed by April 2025.

Portico’s pilot project to preserve at-risk news content

Our third new initiative is a pilot project we have undertaken in response to concerns from the community about the state of news preservation, particularly in light of the economic challenges faced by small local news organizations. Portico has been exploring a potential solution to this important challenge.

We have developed a pilot project, partnering with faculty at the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute, who helped connect us to the Columbia Missourian and Leader Publications. Portico worked directly with the newspapers’ content management system and is now successfully preserving both newspapers. To test whether the model can be applied to additional platforms and newspapers, we have engaged with a third news organization, The Beacon, which uses Newspack. Newspack is built on WordPress, which is used by as many as two-thirds of small US newspapers. We are completing work on a tool that will streamline the participation process for these newspapers and allow us to harvest and preserve their content with minimal cost and effort. Our goal in 2025 is to add 30 newspapers as participants and develop tools and processes to preserve their content in the archive. 

If you’re interested in reviewing the current status of your content at Portico, please visit audit.portico.org. There you will find our dashboard, where you can see an overview of our progress and conduct a deeper audit of your content. Let us know if you would like us to send your login credentials.

Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions about the work discussed here or the status or your content. We welcome the community’s input on our work; please feel free to reach out to us at support@portico.org with questions or feedback. We look forward to working with you in 2025.