ACRL/NEC joint program on archiving electronic journals

I attended the ACRL/New England Chapter Serials Librarians Interest Group/Information Technology Interest Group's 2005 Joint Program: “Here today: here tomorrow?: Journal archiving in the electronic environment” last week, June 2, 2005, at the Gutman Conference Center, Harvard University.

This was an information-packed program on a very timely topic. There were 5 speakers; I heard 3 full presentations and one partial one. My report on the 3 full presentations I attended:

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 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: that 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 bee 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: they receive the source file from the publisher; they convert the file to archival format and retain 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.