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Portico Takes on ‘100-Year Archive Dilemma’


Group committed to preserving scholarly journals in electronic form

By Jeff Feinman
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December 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 3)
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.”




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