Portico and the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library (SHEDL) announced today that all 19 SHEDL institutions have initiated participation in the Portico digital preservation service. By joining Portico, Scottish libraries and their faculty and students now are assured future access to nearly 12,000 e-journals and 66,000 e-books, if and when needed.
“As a consortium, SHEDL is providing journal content for all its members. Reassurance on the long-term availability of this content is very important for SHEDL members, and our agreement with Portico is a vital element of this reassurance,” said Tony Kidd, SHEDL Steering Group Convenor.
SHEDL was founded in 2008 to support learning and teaching and to stimulate better research in Scotland. Through its own work and its relationship with the UK-wide JISC Collections, member libraries have access to a large and growing collection of digital content, including significant e-journal and e-book holdings. Portico preserves important parts of this collection, including content from all the major academic publishers as well as university presses and learned societies representing over 60% of the NESLi2 and NESLi2 SMP publishers. Portico participation will enable SHEDL institutions to rely on the digital collection in lieu of maintaining local print holdings or investing redundantly in digital preservation efforts.
“As electronic library collections continue to expand, preserving digital resources in ways that are trusted, reliable, and cost-effective for the academic community is more important than ever,” said Eileen Fenton, Portico Managing Director. “We are delighted to play a role in the long-term preservation strategy for SHEDL and that they have chosen to support and invest in our community-based approach.”
In addition to the SHEDL group, Portico is supported by nearly 700 libraries and 117 publishers representing 2,000 scholarly societies around the world. In 2010, Portico became the first preservation service to be certified as a trusted digital repository by the Center for Research Libraries, an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries.
SHEDL Institutions Participating in Portico:
University of Aberdeen
University of Abertay Dundee
University of Dundee
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh College of Art
Edinburgh Napier University
University of Glasgow
Glasgow Caledonian University
Glasgow School of Art
Heriot-Watt University
Queen Margaret University
Robert Gordon University
Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama
University of St Andrews
Scottish Agricultural College
University of Stirling
University of Strathclyde
UHI Millennium Institute
University of the West of Scotland
For a complete list of Portico-related facts and figures, please visit Portico’s Archive Facts & Figures. The complete list of titles and participating publishers is available at www.portico.org/digital-preservation/.