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Executive Director's Summary of 2006

Dear Colleagues,

We are presently in the very early stage of making a transition from reliance on print to electronic journals, and there is so much to learn. As an increasing number of publishers and libraries choose to incorporate Portico into their archival strategies, and as we gain experience as one operational component of the community's necessary archival infrastructure, it is our goal to keep you apprised of our progress, as well as share some lessons learned along the way. In this way we hope to contribute to a broader understanding of the digital preservation challenge even as we develop a successful and reliable e-journal archiving service.

In 2006, 22 new publishers began participation in Portico bringing the total publisher participants to 27. These publishers have committed more than 5,700 journals - approximately 10 million articles - for long-term preservation in Portico. Our discussions with publishers continue to progress well, and we have observed two notable trends. First, many publishers are now developing multi-layered archival strategies and are working with various archiving partners to implement these strategies. Second, publishers are increasingly offering multiple means to address post-cancellation concerns in an effort to provide enhanced flexibility to the library community. To date, 19 publishers have designated Portico as (one of) their mechanisms to meet this need. A list of publisher participants is available at: http://www.portico.org/about/part_publishers.html. Titles committed to the archive are listed at: http://www.portico.org/about/committed_titles_alpha.html.

Publishers not only committed their titles to Portico this past year, but they also began to submit their content for ingest and normalization in the archive. As the year ended, more than 343,000 articles from 587 titles representing seven publishers had been preserved. Archived content may be viewed by librarians for audit and verification purposes via the Portico website, which is operated and maintained for us by JSTOR. This portion of the website was activated in September, and passwords were distributed to designated librarians at participating institutions.

The initial group of Portico library participants, or "Archive Founders", was also remarkable. At the close of 2006, 351 libraries were eligible for this designation, covering a spectrum of institutions from small liberal arts colleges to large university systems. Interestingly, almost 25% of the participation from this initial group came from eight countries outside the U.S. In addition, Portico initiated agreements with 20 different consortia, which were instrumental in educating their constituents about e-archiving in general and Portico in particular.

Throughout our library discussions, it has been clear that regardless of institution size, librarians are now actively formulating archival strategies appropriately matched to institutional preservation needs. A full listing of library participants is available at: http://www.portico.org/about/participating_libraries.html, and consortia at: http://www.portico.org/libraries/consortia.html.

Throughout the year Portico was also actively engaged in a variety of initiatives within the preservation community. For instance, we participated in the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) project to develop formal repository audit and certification procedures. This project included hosting a test audit of the Portico archive by CRL in March, and a report on the project is forthcoming from CRL. We also participated in meetings of the members of the Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) network and continued our service on the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) DTD Advisory Board. In addition, Portico staff shared the results of our early work at more than 20 conferences and over 100 library and consortia visits throughout the year.

Although 2006 was a very full year, 2007 promises to be even busier! Our priorities for this year are clear. We will work to significantly increase the scale of our ingest operations to effectively manage the growing body of content that has been entrusted to our care. We will continue to broaden our publisher and library participant base, and we will continue to enhance our communications with the community, seeking especially to strengthen our capacity to communicate details of the archive's holdings as they grow.

As Portico's work progresses, we are mindful that we carry out our archival role on behalf of the publishers and libraries that have collaborated with us to make this reliable, permanent journal archive a reality. We very much appreciate the opportunity to work with the community in furtherance of the important digital preservation agenda. Over the past months, I have heard from many of you directly regarding Portico's contributions to this agenda, and I have been grateful for your continued willingness to offer advice and suggestions. Your input has strengthened and informed our efforts in many ways, and I hope that you will continue to feel free to be in touch with me directly with any questions, comments, or suggestions that you might have.

I look forward to hearing from you and wish you the best for the coming spring.

Sincerely,

Eileen Fenton
Executive Director, Portico

Please see the Executive Director's Summary of 2006 (PDF) for a printer-formatted version of this letter.

Last updated on April 10, 2007