Report on: "Here today: here tomorrow?: Journal archiving in the electronic environment" -Presenters- Victoria Reich, David Bretthaur, Donna Berryman, and Michael Spinella & Eileen Fenton Gutman Conference Center Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Report by: Janice Schuster, Providence College and Melissa Behney, Connecticut College Co-sponsored by: Serials Librarians Interest Group (SLIG)
June 2, 2005

Victoria Reich, Director and co-founder of the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) program, spoke about the need to create a digital archive to ensure persistent access for web delivered information. This type of archiving continues the traditional role of preservation by libraries and removes the burden from the publisher. LOCKSS, open access software, turns a PC into a preservation tool. One PC can hold 3000 years of an average electronic journal. Once a LOCKSS box is set-up it crawls and collects http delivered content. LOCKSS is a self-healing system designed to ensure that content remains the same over time. Once the content is in your LOCKSS box, you own it and no one can take it back - if the publisher goes away, the content can still be served to the reader. Institutions running a LOCKSS box get content as it is published. In addition to archiving electronic journals, LOCKSS boxes can be used for a variety of digital archiving projects. For example, ASERL (the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries) is using it to archive their dissertations. Vicky encouraged everyone in the audience to bring up a LOCKSS Box (the software is free, you only need the hardware), build eCollections and join the LOCKSS community. Fees are reasonably priced (cost for medium sized institutions is $3246).

David Bretthaur, Network Services Librarian at the University of Connecticut Libraries followed Vicky's talk with his presentation about UConn's experience with LOCKSS from a technical point of view. He asserted that LOCKSS was easy to use and took very little time to maintain. It is not really an I.T. project but it does need a champion. One concern that he did note is that LOCKSS requires a static IP and the lack of an internal library I.T. department may cause some difficulty in getting it established. UConn is currently working on a GPO Pilot Project using the LOCKSS system to archive government documents.

View the powerpoint presentation: Building the EJournal Safety Net

Donna Berryman, Outreach Coordinator for the New England Region (NER) of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM), spoke on "PubMed Central (PMC): NLM and NIH looking to the future." She began with a definition of PMC: NLM's free digital depository or archive of the biomedical and life science journal literature. http://www.pubmedcentral.gov

When PMC was started in February of 2000, there were 2 journal titles included. Today there are 180 titles covering over 382,000 articles, letters, etc., published in those journals. PMC claims no copyright to the material; the copyright remains with the publisher or author. The entire contents of all of the journals is not included, but there is the minimum requirement that all peer-reviewed, primary research articles must be provided by the publisher. Also, not all of the contents of PMC are in PubMed, due to different scopes for the 2 databases (i.e. PubMed contains book reviews and PMC does not, etc.)

NLM provides digital hosting; enriched linking; free digital copy of content. They are working on digitizing back issues of the journals to create a complete archive of PMC journals. The goal is to bring the collection to users who believe that if something is not online, that it doesn't exist.

Ms. Berryman concluded by summarizing the value of PMC: It's a single repository which allows full-text searching of the journals included and supports specialized searching.

The next speaker was Michael Spinella, Executive Director, JSTOR, whose presentation was on "JSTOR and new trends in electronic journal archiving." He gave a brief history of JSTOR. It was started in 1995 to digitize the print version of a select list of journals and that the issue of archiving the digitized version was a separate issue from the beginning. He quoted Mark Twain: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

Mr. Spinella mentioned that JSTOR was born out of a realization that the body of scholarly literature is vast and that there was a need to digitize the print literature. He described the features of an electronic archive: consistent technological standards; cooperation and trust among stakeholders (i.e. publisher, author, archive, etc.); knowledge of legal environment and ability to secure rights to the material; organizational commitment to preservation; financial stability and sustainability; and ability to prepare for change. JSTOR provides all of these features.

In the early days, JSTOR focused on print with one goal of enabling libraries to limit their capital expense and to free up shelf space, as well as to ensure that a digital copy would persist. JSTOR preserves the original print source, too, by keeping 2 print copies of everything that they digitize. They use "3rd-party stewardship" to maintain the 2 copies: they work with both the California Digital Library and with Harvard University to house the archived print copies. In order to preserve "born-digital" content, i.e. those journals which were originally published electronically and have never been published in print, JSTOR launched the E-archive initiative in 2002.

Eileen Fenton, Executive Director of Portico, spoke next on "JSTOR and new trends in electronic journal archiving". Portico began as the E-archive initiative of JSTOR mentioned by Mr. Spinella at the end of his presentation. She began by asking why should we archive? The answer includes: archiving provides links to scholarly activity which is needed in order to support and further teaching, research, and scholarship. In the past, libraries played the sole archiving role; in the future, publishers will have a greater role to play.

Ms. Fenton defined archiving as: ensuring that a valid, reliable copy of the work exists and is accessible by current technology; it's ongoing and proactive. It is not file storage management; publishing; re-publishing. Archiving requires: mission (preservation should be a key component of the institution's mission); economic model; technical infrastructure; content; metadata; standards and formats.

Portico's mission is to preserve scholarly literature which was published in electronic format (i.e. born-digital). It began with a pilot phase during which the staff sought to understand the technological and economic issues involved in the project. The Portico process of archiving includes: receiving the source file from the publisher; converting the file to archival format, and retaining the source file for the long-term; Portico preserves the intellectual content of the journal, including text images, but the "look and feel" of the journal is NOT preserved.

Report by:
Janice Schuster
Reference Librarian
Providence College
Providence, RI
jschuster@providence.edu

and

Report by:
Melissa Behney
Executive Assistant to the Vice President and Research & Instruction Librarian
Connecticut College
New london, CT
mabeh@conncoll.edu

Comments Welcome!