Special Libraries News

Northwestern Joins Portico Archive Pilot Project

Northwestern University Library has accepted an invitation from Portico, the Mellon-funded not-for-profit digital preservation service launched in 2005 as part of Ithaka Harbors, to participate in an exciting new project to preserve locally created scholarly electronic content within the Portico archive. Northwestern will be partnering with fourteen other academic libraries to develop this new service, to be formally launched in Spring 2009. This partnership comes at just the right time for Northwestern, where we are well on our way to establishing our own repository infrastructure on the Fedora platform. Partners in the Portico Archive Pilot Project include Brigham Young University, Middlebury College, University of British Columbia and McMaster University in Canada, and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

The mission of Portico is to preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that these materials remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students. Currently, 56 publishers have committed more than 7,700 journals to the Portico archive, of which 4,199 have already been preserved. 468 libraries have joined Portico, including Northwestern as a charter member.

The new preservation service, which is one of Portico's first steps beyond e-journal preservation, involves developing protocols or "connectors" to facilitate the exchange of e-content between the Portico Archive and Northwestern's own institutional repository. The purpose is to protect locally-created repository content in the same way that Portico protects vulnerable e-journal content in the event of catastrophic loss, e.g through publisher bankruptcy.

At Northwestern, Library IT and the Digital Collections Department of Special Libraries will be the lead units in working with Portico. Steve DiDomenico, senior IS architecture engineer in IT, has been named our chief contact to Portico, but he will be working closely with Stu Baker, Bill Parod, Claire Stewart, and others to make this collaboration a success.