‘An irreplaceable source of information’

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Gaëlle Béquet, director of ISSN International Centre, outlines the work of the Keepers Registry – followed by interviews with four of its partner agencies

Gaëlle Béquet

Keepers Registry (keepers.issn.org) is the service that aims to inform the community of librarians and publishers about the actions taken by archiving agencies across the globe to preserve titles of digitised and born-digital serial publications bearing an eISSN in order to promote long-term access to documentary resources, and thus consolidate scientific references for the world of research.

Since 2008, the ISSN International Centre (ISSN-IC) has been working with EDINA (University of Edinburgh) and Jisc to develop the Keepers Registry. In July 2019, when EDINA withdrew from the service due to a lack of funding, ISSN-IC’s governing board voted to approve that it could take over Keepers Registry as a natural extension of the ISSN Portal’s services. 

This strategic decision turns the ISSN Portal (portal.issn.org) into an irreplaceable source of information about periodicals at all stages of their existence, from their creation and their identification by the ISSN Network, to their preservation by the partner archiving agencies. As of December last year, the ISSN Portal started hosting Keepers Registry with Archaeology Data Service (UK), British Library (UK), Cariniana Network (Brazil), CLOCKSS Archive (USA), Global LOCKSS Network (USA), HathiTrust (USA), Library of Congress (USA), National Digital Preservation Program (China), National Library of the Netherlands, PKP Preservation Network (Canada), Portico (USA), Scholars Portal (Canada), and the Swiss National Library contributing holdings data for digital serials.

Despite challenging working conditions due to the pandemic, the ISSN-IC and the ISSN Network have made remarkable progress with the Keepers Registry: by developing additional features to provide statistics about archived titles across agencies, by updating the ISSN Portal’s linked data formats to include data holdings for records describing archived digital titles, and by creating new records and assigning eISSN to resources for which so far only the printed version had been identified.

The Keepers Registry features prominently in the 2024 Strategy of ISSN-IC. We want to expand the range of archiving agencies and improve the geographical coverage of the service, as well as diversify the digital titles under custody. Geographical representativeness is an important issue: currently, only two archiving services are not based in North America or Europe. This tropism must be mitigated by actively seeking partners on other continents and the ISSN-IC counts on the support of Unesco to broaden its outreach.

The Keepers Registry operates under the freemium model of the ISSN Portal, that combines free and fee-based services. In the coming months, ISSN-IC and its partner archiving agencies will consider and implement additional offerings, such as a referral service for publishers to identify suitable archiving agencies, an ISSN and title list submission that will allow users to check which titles are archived and those that are not. Another path to explore is how Keepers Registry can interoperate with Transfer (journaltransfer.issn.org), which monitors transfers of titles between publishers under the Transfer code of practice maintained by NISO.

ISSN-IC and partner archiving agencies are deeply committed to enhancing this essential infrastructure for researchers, publishers and librarians in the coming months. The implementation of the governance of Keepers Registry that will involve its sponsors and its users is the first phase of our development strategy.

 

Kate Wittenberg, managing director, Portico, USA, with Amy Kirchhoff, product manager, archive service; and Stephanie Orphan, director, publisher relations

Unesco and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) published an Executive Guide on Digital Preservation in May last year. In your opinion, what are the challenges of international co-operation on digital preservation? How can digital preservation programmes be more inclusive?

International co-operation in digital preservation can be challenging due to the differences in policies, laws, and approaches in various countries. However, there are examples of effective international collaborations that have contributed to progress in this area.

Some countries have established national legal deposit legislation and have engaged in international partnerships to make progress in this area. For example, Portico works with the British Library (BL) to support its legal deposit programme. Since the start of the engagement in April 2013, Portico has delivered more than 6.5 million articles, which the BL is processing, preserving, and delivering to the other UK deposit libraries and to the BL’s reading rooms for use by patrons on a daily basis. 

Another example of international collaboration on preservation is Portico’s partnership with the National Library of the Netherlands (KB). For more than ten years, Portico and the KB have collaborated in jointly formulating our respective institutions’ understanding and implementation of the principles, practices, procedures and technologies for preservation. As part of this collaboration, we have established an online replica of the Portico archive in the KB, an arrangement that contributes to the safety of Portico’s archive and which aligns with the mission of the KB to preserve the scholarly record.

The DPC’s BitList provides an overview of digital content that is important to preserve. How does your archive contribute to the preservation of endangered content?

Portico is committed to preserving the electronic records of scholarly materials for the benefit of the academic community and its future researchers and students. Our focus is preserving the files provided to us by the publishers and other content providers with whom we have agreements. We maintain a format registry that is updated as needed to include format types; all files with an identified format type are fully preserved. 

If we receive files in a format that cannot be identified, those files are byte preserved. While we are certainly preserving content types that are included on BitList, such as PDF/A, published research articles, and video files, the lens through which we identify endangered content is typically one concerned with whether publications or products are sustainable. For example, the long tail of small OA journals are more at risk than those titles supported by larger publishing operations. 

We are also researching ways in which to properly preserve non-traditional forms of scholarship, such as dynamic and interactive works, which are otherwise at risk of becoming unusable in the future. An example of this is our participation in a Mellon-funded grant project at New York University – Enhancing Services to Preserve New Forms of Digital Scholarship.

It is important to validate good practices in the field of digital archiving and several certifications exist, such as TRAC metrics, CoreTrustSeal, Nestor Seal for Trustworthy Digital Archives. Should certification be made compulsory at the national, or even international level?

We believe that standards and requirements for certification should be addressed on a country-by-country, or even sector-by-sector basis.

The OAIS standard is the cornerstone for electronic archiving. Are there other recommendations or standards that are particularly important and is your organisation implementing them?

Portico preserves journals, books, standards, digitised historic collections, and, more recently, database-like reference works. In our sector, the following standards are in common use:

  • Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), https://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/, is a standard for encoding metadata about preserved objects.  Portico does not internally use METS, but we can export to it.
  • Dublin Core, https://dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/, is a set of vocabulary terms that can be used to describe objects. Portico applies the 15 properties in the elements namespace to every item preserved.
  • Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS), https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/, and its Book Interchange Tag Suite (BITS) and NISO Standards Tag Suite (NISO-STS) extensions are commonly used by Portico and others as XML formats.
  • The PREMIS Data Dictionary, https://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/, captures objects, events, agents and rights about preserved objects. Portico’s preservation metadata is informed by PREMIS and we can export to it.
  • The BagIt File Packaging Format, https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc8493.txt, describes a file layout convention for the storage and transfer of digital content. Portico uses BagIt extensively within the archive for transferring content.

 

Mark Jordan, associate dean of libraries, digital strategy, Public Knowledge Project, Canada

Unesco and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) published an Executive Guide on Digital Preservation in May last year. In your opinion, what are the challenges of international co-operation on digital preservation? How can digital preservation programmes be more inclusive?

Given increasing environmental change (such as rising sea levels) and increasing political instability in many countries, geographic distribution of copies of content, one of the fundamental tenets of digital preservation, is becoming increasingly important but at the same time increasingly threatened by differences in international law that impinges on digital preservation.

For example, some countries’s copyright laws allow the archiving of digital content for preservation purposes, while others do not. Country-specific take-down procedures also complicate international digital preservation. In a preservation network where copies of the preserved content reside in multiple legal jurisdictions, respecting each countries’ copyright laws adds substantial administrative burden to the network, and also jeopardises the ability to synchronise copies of the content.

 Differences in privacy laws across international jurisdictions have a similar impact. The lower the uniformity in participating institutions’ legal ability to store personal information in preserved content, the less consistent the replicated copies of that content will be, ultimately undermining the viability of the preservation network as a whole.

The DPC’s BitList provides an overview of digital content that is important to preserve. How does your archive contribute to the preservation of endangered content?

The Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network (PKP PN) provides digital preservation to any journal running Open Journal Systems (OJS). Many OJS journals are either run independently from large publishers, or are run by institutions that do not have access to commercial preservation services for financial or other reasons. These journals’ content is at high risk of completely disappearing unless they join a free, low-barrier service such as the PKP PN. 

It is important to validate good practices in the field of digital archiving and several certifications exist such as TRAC metrics, CoreTrustSeal, Nestor Seal for Trustworthy Digital Archives. Should certification be made compulsory at the national, or even international level? 

Affordable and financially sustainable certification should be mandatory. Certification is extremely important because it holds preservation services accountable for the claims they make, and for instilling trust in their designated communities. However, the very high cost of Trac certification, for example, makes it unachievable for many preservation services, even at the national level in some coutries. Achieving and maintaining certification is a real cost of digital preservation, and one that must be addressed.

The OAIS standard is the cornerstone for electronic archiving. Are there other recommendations or standards that are particularly important and is your organisation implementing them?

Not currently. High-level compliance with the OAIS refererence model is sufficient for the PKP PN. We are open to implementing additional frameworks but do not currently see the need to do so.

 

Zhenxin Wu, deputy director of the digital preservation center of Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Science Library, Beijing, China

Unesco and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) published an Executive Guide on Digital Preservation in May last year. In your opinion, what are the challenges of international co-operation on digital preservation? How can digital preservation programmes be more inclusive?

With the continuous development of big data and complex digital object types, the complexity and cost of digital preservation are constantly increasing, meaning that
co-operation regarding digital preservation has become an inevitable trend.

I personally think the most important challenge which the international co-operation of digital preservation is facing is the sustainability of the co-operation model. How to ensure the consistency of international co-operation goals? How to balance the responsibilities and benefits of participants in co-operation?

These are important issues which must be addressed. We can only succeed by ensuring that the partners have compatible goals, be it prestige, knowledge and technology, or other
goals, and benefit from sustained co-operation. 

At the same time, the international digital preservation plan should consider the different roles and contributions of the participants, distinguish their various goals and expectations, and their abilities and willingness to contribute. This will help to attract more contributors.

The DPC’s BitList provides an overview of digital content that is important to preserve. How does your archive contribute to the preservation of endangered content?

Digital preservation is a complex, expensive and long-term activity. Archiving agencies should carefully formulate preservation actions. NDPP will evaluate digital resources and formulate preservation policies around our core mission, and gradually expand the scope of preserved resources in accordance with our capacities.

At the same time, we will co-operate with other archiving agencies to promote the preservation of endangered content in China and beyond. NDPP aims to preserve the digital resources in science and technology, initially aiming at publications, and gradually expanding to other digital objects and information resources (such as data, methods, tools and discussions).

It is important to validate good practices in the field of digital archiving and several certifications exist such as TRAC metrics, CoreTrustSeal, Nestor Seal for Trustworthy Digital Archives. Should certification be made compulsory at the national, or even international level?

Trustworthy auditing and certification are very important for digital preservation. It is a very good reference and guidance for practitioners by regulating their activities. Since each certified system or organisation needs to spend a lot of manpower to prepare for certification, it is more difficult for a small-scale (or not long-lasting) project or organisation. The current standard is more suitable for institutions with long-term and stable funding; in addition, for non-English projects and institutions, the translation of a large number of documents is also a time-consuming and labour-intensive task.

Therefore, the necessity and feasibility of compulsory implementation at the national and even international levels need to be fully considered. However, relevant domains in various countries, such as libraries or archives, can consider formulating standards that meet local issues and become compulsory.

The OAIS standard is the cornerstone for electronic archiving. Are there other recommendations or standards that are particularly important and is your organisation implementing them?

We use standards implemented at the global level, such as OAIS, ISO 16363 Space data and information transfer systems – audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories, and PREMIS. We have implemented them fully in our preservation activities, including preservation policy making, archiving system designing and developing, and trusted process management.

 

Miguel Ángel Márdero Arellano, co-ordinator of the Cariniana Network, IBICT, Brazil

Unesco and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) published an Executive Guide on Digital Preservation in May last year. In your view, what are the challenges of international co-operation on digital preservation, and how can digital preservation programmes be more inclusive?

At the international level, collaborative and distributed digital preservation networks help maintain information access services for libraries and archives that are at risk of losing their digital content. The Distributed Digital Preservation (DDP) approach proposes the creation of distributed copies in digital archives on geographically dispersed servers, to ensure their survival in the face of risks of loss and destruction of important digital collections. This model of collaboration has the challenge of supporting secure storage options and public and restricted access.

In Latin American countries, the commitment of government agencies to open access content preservation programmes depends on the level that these agencies have achieved in monitoring the materials that are deposited in the information systems maintained by the state. Also, on the role that it confers on institutions at the national level to co-ordinate initiatives for open access to scientific and cultural information. The sustainability of inclusive actions comes from the financial and human resource support that governments provide to programmes through their federal funding agencies.

The DPC’s BitList provides an overview of digital content that is important to preserve. How does your archive contribute to the preservation of endangered content? 

In Brazil, there are many digital collections of significant historical, scientific, artistic, cultural and environmental value that urgently require the establishment of uniform and efficient methods for their mapping and preservation. Libraries and archives have opted for the use of digital repositories to organise and provide access to the scientific and cultural production of teaching and research institutions. Most collections are open access and can be archived in digital preservation systems. 

The Brazilian Institute of Information on Science and Technology (IBICT) is an agency supported by the Brazilian government that has recommended the use of open source tools and the commitment of institutions to preserve long-term access to this production, as stated in policies and plans for digital preservation. The Brazilian Network of Digital Preservation Services – Cariniana – is a consortium co-ordinated by IBICT that promotes distributed preservation and the implementation of archiving and digital curation techniques in partner institutions. Rede Cariniana also disseminates methodologies to adopt best practices for risk prevention and internationally recommended contingency plans. 

It is important to validate best practices in the field of digital archiving and there are several certifications such as TRAC metrics, CoreTrustSeal, Nestor Seal for Trustworthy Digital Archives. Should certification be mandatory at the national, or even international level?

Evaluations, audits and certifications can be considered one of the main methods for defining reliable repositories, since they depend on the evaluation of specialists who define the security and reliability of information systems. There is a general consensus in the Digital Preservation community that auditing and certification are welcome and there are many organisations that have expressed in their policies their intention to get certified in the coming years.

Complying with these mandatory requirements to preserve growing, valuable and at-risk digital collections helps repository managers to focus and refine operational policies, highlight opportunities for development, and assess the risks associated with gaps in repository funding.

Auditing and certification tools create a more complete picture of the role of repositories in digital object management, from the time of acquisition and creation of metadata, to storage and planning of preservation metadata schema strategies.

The OAIS standard is the cornerstone of electronic archiving. Are there any other recommendations or standards that are particularly important, and is your organisation implementing them?

All efforts to develop standards regarding digital preservation aim at ensuring that information contained in preservation systems remains accessible over a long period of time. In Brazil, IBICT is committed to the adoption of preservation systems based on the OAIS model. Our partner institutions within the Cariniana network have developed classification schemes for support functions, appraisal schedules and controlled vocabularies, to monitor the types of documents produced by the participating institutions, define the archiving period of the documents and specify their final destination. 

In Brazil, resolutions 39 and 43 of the Committee for National Archives (http://conarq.gov.br/resolucoes-do-conarq.html) consider digital repositories as the sole organisations responsible for the storage and management of digital documents. 

According to these resolutions, repositories must manage documents and metadata according to the practices and standards of archival science, specifically related to document management, description and preservation at various levels. One recommendation states that systems should be designed in accordance with conventions and standards such as ISO 16363, which specifies guidelines for assessing and certifying repositories