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Portico's Archival Approach

The Goal

The mission of Portico is to preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that these materials remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students. In pursuing this mission our initial focus is the preservation of electronic scholarly journals, and we are working directly with publishers and libraries to ensure the future of this important genre. Our archival approach begins with receipt of source files, which comprise the intellectual content of electronic scholarly journals, directly from publishers, and features transformation or "normalization" of these diverse files to a standard archival format which can be reliably managed over the long term. Several principles guide this work.

Guiding Principles

The integrity of the scholarly record must be preserved.

The archive must accept the content as it was published and should not correct or alter the record.
The archive must preserve the intellectual content of the electronic journal as completely as possible, although we recognize that some electronic content may have already been lost.

Source files reliably capture the intellectual content of electronic scholarly journals.

Source files are electronic files containing graphics, text, or other material that comprise an electronic journal article, issue, or volume. Source files may differ from files presented online most typically by including more information or higher quality graphics.
Collaboration with publishers is necessary in order to identify the full set of source files that will meet the archival goal.

Preservation can be achieved through migration.

Portico's primary preservation methodology is migration, which involves transitioning content from one file format to another as technology changes and as file formats become obsolete.
An initial migration is performed when the source files are received and normalized to the archival format. Portico's archival format is based on the open standard Journal Archiving and Interchange DTD developed by the National Library of Medicine's National Center for Biotechnology Information with input from Mulberry Technologies, Inc., Inera, Inc., and Harvard University Libraries with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Archiving is Portico's focus.

Portico's role is to preserve the intellectual content of the published journal rather than publisher business systems, related data or platforms.
Aggregation, content enhancement or other value-add activities, are important activities but are not the focus of the archive; it is not the archive's task to republish or add value to previously published content.

Reliance upon accepted standards enhances archival reliability.

A sampling of the standards which have influenced Portico's archival approach include:

For a more detailed explanation of Portico's archival approach, please see the first paper in our series, Papers from Portico.

Further information is available from participation@portico.org.

Last updated on March 30, 2007