Portico will participate in Embedding Preservability, a three-year project led by the NYU Libraries’ Digital Library Technology Services unit and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The goal of the project is to support publishers in making design choices that result in publications, including very complex ones, that can be preserved at scale without sacrificing functionality. The project will refine, expand, and operationalize the guidelines established during the previous Enhancing Services to Preserve New Forms of Scholarship grant.

A team of preservation experts will be embedded with various publishers to directly observe and participate in the technology-decision process and learn the editorial and production workflow at each publisher. The team will include a digital preservation specialist from the University of Michigan Library, and technical leads from Portico and LOCKSS. They will consult with the Webrecorder team to explore specific web archiving challenges and with technicians for the Manifold, PubPub, Fulcrum, and RavenSpace publishing platforms. As the embedded preservation specialists analyze publications, they will provide suggestions for adjustments that will improve preservability of the publications.

Publishing partners in the project include Michigan Publishing, University of Minnesota Press, University of British Columbia Press, and the Knowledge Futures Group.