In 2019, Portico made great progress on scholarly preservation with the support of our library and publisher participants. Together, we expanded the archive, developed efficient new processes, and engaged with the community on critical issues in preservation. Our 2019 activities included:

Expanding the archive while controlling costs

In 2019, the archive grew by 8.4%, to 1.78 billion files being preserved across journals, ebooks, and digital collections. View a snapshot of the growth in content, participation, trigger events, and usage.

As always, Portico follows exacting standards for the management of the archive, including normalizing the metadata, maintaining authentic replicas of each original file and an audit trail of new files we create, and monitoring for threats of obsolescing file types to make sure that content will remain usable. These practices ensure reliable preservation well into the future. We’ve also made strides on controlling costs by implementing pre-ingest processes that allow us to minimize manual interventions and scale up without increasing staff.

Preserving complex new types of scholarship

Portico is part of a joint effort to explore best practices for preserving new forms of digital scholarship, led by NYU Press and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Karen Hanson, Senior Research Developer for Portico, outlined the challenges in preserving the enhanced digital monograph and opportunities to collect, process, and provide access to more dynamic materials in an article for the Digital Preservation Coalition.

In 2020, we will deliver a set of guidelines and best practices for publishers to ensure that new forms of digital scholarship have the best chance to be preserved successfully.

Providing access when needed

To date, we have triggered 125 titles that became unavailable through the publisher or another online source; this content is now available through the Portico archive. This includes 103 open access titles, which remain open access through Portico.

We also continue to provide library participants with post-cancellation access; 79% of e-journals and 73% of e-books are available for perpetual access/post-cancellation access claims.

Co-developing a text and data mining platform

JSTOR and Portico are building a platform that will teach and enable a generation of researchers to do text mining. It includes a user interface to allow researchers, students, and instructors to curate, visualize, and save custom datasets, as well as a teaching and development environment with tutorials and templates for new text miners.

We’ve released a prototype, and we’re currently working with a set of ten institutions to identify and build additional features this year ahead of releasing the service in 2021.

 

We’re grateful to all our participants for their support of Portico, and 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 building on our collaborative success in 2020.