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Portico's Archival Approach
The Goal
Portico preserves scholarly literature published in electronic form to ensure these materials remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students. 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. We are also working to preserve e-books and other scholarly materials. 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.
- 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.
- Audit of the archive is essential.
- For audit purposes, Portico provides password access to all content in the archive to 4 representatives at every participating library and to participating publishers for their own titles.
- In 2009, Portico was the first digital preservation service to be independently audited by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and subsequently certified as a trusted, reliable digital preservation solution that serves the needs of the library community. Read the announcement for more information.
- 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.
Please contact us for more information.
Last
updated on January 25, 2010
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