Portico and the KB, National Library of the Netherlands, are pleased to announce that they have extended their longstanding collaboration to host an online replica of the Portico archive at the KB.

For more than a decade, the KB and Portico cooperated to form and implement their respective digital preservation principles and practices. They have worked together over the years to research the handling of digital preservation formats and to develop automated preservation workflows. As part of this work, Portico provided copies of its archive, on disk, to the KB, which maintained custody of this offline copy. In 2018, Portico and the KB worked together to establish an online replica of the Portico archive at the KB, and have now agreed to extend this hosting arrangement.

“Portico believes in the importance of having archive replicas that include varied technologies, geographical locations and institutional identities. We are fortunate to have the opportunity to work with the KB in fulfilling our mission. Having a replica of the Portico archive in Europe, hosted by the KB, provides Portico’s library and publisher supporters around the world with additional assurance of the long-term safeguarding of the content we preserve.” said Kate Wittenberg, Managing Director of Portico.

Jeffrey van der Hoeven, Head of Digital Preservation at the KB said,“Portico and the KB share the same core values when it comes to keeping digital publications safe for future generations. We’re very pleased with the continuation of our collaboration with Portico, as it strengthens our preservation strategy for safeguarding scholarly information across continents. It also underlines the success of being a reliable partner for each other in safeguarding digital heritage for the long-term. We will continue to share our infrastructure, knowledge, and experience to improve preservation of and access to digital content, just as we have over the past several years”

About Portico and the KB:

Portico is a community-supported digital preservation service that safeguards access to e-journals, e-books, and digital collections to ensure they remain accessible and usable for future researchers, scholars, and students through a methodology that includes replicas located with trusted partners. Portico is increasingly called upon by national libraries to provide preservation expertise and infrastructure, and its collaboration with the KB is part of this important work.

Digital preservation is an active field in which libraries, archives, museums, and many other organizations are dealing with the fragility of digital information in order to prevent loss of our digital heritage. The National Library of the Netherlands is traditionally a frontrunner in this field as well as an innovator in the technical and organizational aspects of digitization and archiving. With its trusted digital repository in place since 2002 – which includes tens of millions of publications – the KB has proven to be committed to ensuring digital heritage for the long-term.

More information about Portico is available at http://www.portico.org
More information on the KB is available at https://www.kb.nl/en