Portico and the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek or KB) have partnered to establish an online replica of the Portico archive that will be hosted by the KB.

Portico and the KB have a long history of collaboration; for more than a decade, they cooperated to form and implement their respective digital preservation principles and practices. They have worked together to research the handling of digital preservation formats and to develop automated preservation workflows. As part of this work, Portico has also provided copies of its archive, on disk, to the KB, which has maintained custody of this offline copy. Portico and the KB are now extending this partnership by establishing an online replica of the Portico archive at the KB.

Marc van den Berg, CIO at the KB, said, ‘’For us, the agreement with Portico to host an online replica of its archive aligns very much with our content strategy. The KB considers it very important to participate in securing scholarly content in an international context, alongside its efforts to secure and provide access to national content and develop a European safe places network.”

Portico additionally has a replica of the archive hosted in the U.S, and another in cloud storage. Kate Wittenberg, Managing Director of Portico, said, “We believe that placing a replica of the Portico archive in Europe, hosted by the KB, will provide Portico’s library and publisher supporters around the world with additional assurance of the long-term safeguarding of the content we preserve.”

The partnership with the KB also extends Portico’s work with national libraries. Portico is increasingly called upon by national libraries to provide preservation expertise and infrastructure, including a longstanding partnership with the British Library to help meet UK legal deposit mandates.