Over the past year, Portico expanded its digital archive and collaborated on important research and projects to prepare for future preservation needs. Here are a few highlights of our latest developments—all made possible through the support of our library and publisher participants.

Growth of our digital archive

Portico’s archive has grown by 16% in the past year, and we are now preserving more than 116 million archival units (journal articles, books, etc). Our improved preservation infrastructure has ensured that we can keep pace with ever-increasing amounts of content. We work to include content that is especially vulnerable, including Open Access content and the long tail of small publishers that publish 10 or fewer titles.

We now have a total of 856 participating publishers from 75 countries, as well as 1,014 participating libraries from 21 countries. This continued support from the community assures that scholarship will remain accessible and usable for the long term.

Research on preserving complex forms of content

Portico is preparing for increasing complex challenges in the future by participating in cutting-edge research on preserving new forms of scholarship. The project, developed in collaboration with NYU Libraries and several university presses and funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will result in guidelines that authors and publishers can use to improve the preservability of complex publications.

Through this research, we have developed expertise in preservation of EPUB3s with embedded multimedia, web-based platforms with enhanced features and supplemental material, and complex dynamic works that depend on large datasets or whose platform and presentation are an integral feature of the work. The guidelines and a final report will be available in the first half of 2021.

Text and data mining

In partnership with JSTOR, we have created Constellate, a text and data analytics service with a focus on teaching analytics skills at all experience levels. Users can create a ready-to-analyze dataset from over 30 million documents with point-and-click ease, use built-in visualizations, or conduct more sophisticated text mining in our Analytics Lab using Jupyter notebooks configured for a range of text analytics methods. You may read more about our beta evaluation period and introductory webinars.

At a time when publishers and libraries continue to face great uncertainty, preservation of the scholarly record is more important than ever, and we’re grateful for the continued support of our participants. As a reminder, you can view resources available to participating institutions, including how to manage access to triggered content and request post-cancellation access when needed.

We welcome the community’s input on our work; please feel free to reach out to us at support@portico.org with questions or feedback. We look forward to working with you in 2021.