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Portico Takes on ‘100-Year Archive Dilemma’


Group committed to preserving scholarly journals in electronic form

By Jeff Feinman
December 15, 2006 — 
Portico is an organization with its eye on the future. The collaboration of librarians and archivists has taken up the mission of preserving the increasing torrent of scholarly journals that are being either transferred to or written in electronic form.

As publishers continue to roll out various forms of electronic literature in a vast number of categories, Portico is trying to snatch up these documents in much the same way that Lucy Ricardo desperately grabbed for chocolate candies on the accelerating conveyer belt in an “I Love Lucy” episode. Created in 2002 as a sister project of the not-for-profit archive organization JSTOR, Princeton, N.J.-based Portico has been saving hundreds of journals involving computer science, agriculture, medicine and politics.

The archiving of electronic journals is a fairly expensive process due to its complexity and scale of the needed infrastructure, Portico says, and individual libraries would be hard-pressed to come up with the necessary funds and infrastructure to archive them in a proper fashion on their own. The hope for a third-party archive like Portico is that there can be a significant number of saved documents, with each library contributing a small financial amount.

“Should the day ever come when a publisher goes out of business or the materials are no longer available from any other source, then those libraries that are choosing to support the archive will have access to the material,” said Eileen Fenton, Portico’s executive director.

Fenton said that even though there is a fair amount of access to electronic journals today, libraries tend to look further down the road, when certain Web sites and avenues for electronic documents may fade from existence.

Access to electronic journals is usually licensed from the publisher’s server rather than purchased. Librarians are concerned about how these materials will be preserved once the servers are no longer available or the publishers go out of business.

STANDING THE TEST OF TIME
There has been some debate as to how to go about archiving electronic records for the distant future, which has been called the “100-year archive dilemma.” Preserving today’s systems and migrating data are methods of archiving that have been suggested, but there are many doubts surrounding those two methods regarding how efficiently they could withstand such a long period of time. According to Michael Peterson, chief strategy advocate for Storage Networking Industry Association, “The only thing that works is to plan for migration. The whole notion of either a logical or physical format lasting a long time is just not going to happen.”

More specifically, certain digital archivists translate data into common plain-text formats, including Unicode or ASCII, which can support all forms of text in all languages.

Companies are adapting as well. Adobe Systems, for instance, created its PDF/A file format, which is more accustomed to long-term archiving. According to Adobe, PDF/A leaves out PDF features that are not suitable for long-term archiving, including the prevention of audio and video files, JavaScript and encryption. The idea for this type of file is that it should be fully self-contained. Peterson said that PDF/A and XML have very good potential to serve as long-term archival systems.

Whichever system proves to hold up the longest, Fenton just hopes to ensure that electronic journals are available for future generations. After working as a librarian in the Yale University Library and the Vanderbilt University Library, Fenton became the director of production at JSTOR. She worked in that capacity until the organization founded Portico in 2002.

Fenton said that Portico does not require any specific format for the files it receives and allows publishers to submit files in whatever format they are comfortable. Using systems and applications such as Documentum, the Oracle Application Server and Solaris, Portico converts the files into a standard archive form that is mandated by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). As laid out by the NLM’s journal archiving format, the file will be converted from its original version into an XML format.

“If we were to say that anything coming into this archive needs to follow this or that standard, it would certainly make our lives easier, but from the publisher’s perspective, what is the incentive to convert the material? Publishers are oriented toward cranking out the next volume of their publication, so their perspective is not necessarily on the long-term preservation of those objects,” Fenton said.

Initial support for Portico has come from organizations including The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Library of Congress, and Ithaka, a not-for-profit organization that offers services and advice to promote higher education. Hundreds of universities have participated in Portico, including Cornell, NYU, UCLA and Yale.

Don Waters, program officer for scholarly communications at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, said, “We gave a series of grants to seven institutions, one of which was to JSTOR to start Portico, to explore ways of archiving electronic journals. Preservation of scholarly materials is a strong part of our mission of support for higher education.”

Archived materials cannot be accessed by the general public, and can be used by universities only under special conditions.

Portico is not alone in the effort to preserve electronic journals. Libraries in parts of Europe are under legal obligation to store digital materials with the expectation that they remain archived forever.


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