Portico Services & Benefits > New Preservation Activities

New Preservation Activities

From e-journals to datasets, many types of electronic resources are in need of trusted digital preservation solutions. Our expertise and services continue to grow as we strive to meet the preservation needs of the academic community. Our new preservation activities include:

Digitisation Programme Digital Preservation Study

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), a non-profit organization that works to preserve digital resources in the UK, recently partnered with Portico and the University London Computing Centre (ULCC) to carry out an extensive analysis of the projects funded through the JISC Digitisation Programme. As a result of this assessment, DPC, Portico and ULCC made a number of recommendations to JISC, which will be of use for other funding bodies as well. The recommendations fall into two groups and include:

For institutions and projects:

  1. Write and Implement a Preservation Policy for Each Digital Collection
  2. Define Collection and Content Management Procedures
  3. Preserve Content in a Suitable Digital Preservation Infrastructure
  4. Identify How the Collection will be Sustained Over Time
  5. Recognize that accepting funding for digitisation implies an institutional commitment which outlives the period of funding.
  6. Be clear about retention periods for different types of created digital content

For funders:

  1. Consider designating or establishing preservation services for content and use appropriate methods to confirm that conditions are being met
  2. Articulate more clearly and enforce requirements for the retention of content
  3. Make the long-term duty on institutions clearer

The full text of the report and series of cases studies are available at DPC.

Digitisation Programme Digital Preservation Study Full Report
Digital Preservation Case Notes

D-Collections

Libraries and publishers have invested significantly in the creation of digitized historical collections (D-Collections). These collections include newspapers, images, and other primary sources vital to research. We announced our first agreement to preserve 10 digitized historical collections from Gale, part of Cengage Learning, in late 2009. Currently this content is being ingested into the archive.

Locally Created Content (LCC)

Libraries and other cultural heritage organizations have growing collections of locally created digital scholarly content. There is a great need to preserve this important portion of the scholarly record.

Portico recently worked with a select group of libraries to evaluate the technology and costs associated with preservation of locally created content. An update on this work is available here.

The libraries participating in this effort included:

The Portico digital preservation service is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use
digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.