The British Library and Portico work together on e-journal deposit infrastructure

The British Library and digital preservation specialist Portico will be working together to help ensure that thousands of electronic journal titles will be collected, preserved and made available to current and future generations of researchers.

The partnership is expected to help the British Library – along with five other legal deposit libraries – to meet legal deposit regulations in the UK that have recently been extended to non-print publications such as e-journals, blogs and websites in the UK web domain.

Portico will use its established workflow and processes to create standardised and uniform journal content that can be exported to the British Library. The organisation has have started with 1,500 journals from three publishers that are already preserving content with Portico. As necessary, Portico will develop new tools for processing additional publisher content.

The British Library and Portico began their work together through a pilot project in 2012. The two organisations developed their systems as part of the pilot and were thus able to 'turn on' automatic delivery of content to the British Library as soon as legislation passed.

Alasdair Ball, head of collection acquisition and description at the British Library, said: 'We’re delighted to be working with Portico, using their expertise and technical infrastructure to help us meet the requirements of the new regulations. By working with a respected and well-established provider, we’ll gradually enable publishers to deposit their electronic journal content easily and securely, thereby ensuring that it’s collected, preserved and made accessible for future generations of researchers.'

Kate Wittenberg, managing director of Portico, added: 'I am excited that together we have identified a way to ensure that the library community is able to use the same set of tools they’ve invested in through Portico to meet national digital preservation needs.'