From Access to Archive Transforming Scholars Portal into an E-Journal Archive

Background  Scholars Portal was conceived as a way to enhance access to scholarly publishing by aggregating and indexing full-text articles from a broad range of publishers and making these searchable under a single interface  Archiving has been a secondary but a practical consideration

What Do We Have?  9.4 million articles from about 20 major publishers and 7,400 titles –Elsevier, Blackwell, Oxford, Cambridge, IEEE, Emerald, Kluwer, Sage, Springer, Wiley, RSC, APA, Berkeley  Backfile collections take coverage back to the 1800s for many journals  Combined with more than 100 million article citations from major abstracting and indexing databases under a local installation of CSA’s Illumina search engine

Is this an Archive?  ARL Bimonthly Report 243 (December 2005) – ARL Endorses Action to Preserve E-Journals –A document describing the “urgent need for digital archiving of electronic journals” was prepared as part of a Mellon sponsored meeting of academic librarians and university administrators in October 2005 –ARL endorsed the document as the basis for developing an action plan for member libraries on archiving e-journals

From Dark to Light

What is an Archive?  Second, in order to address these risk factors and provide insurance against loss, qualified preservation archives would provide a minimal set of well-defined services.  Such archives are beginning to emerge and must at least …

Measuring Up 1.Receive files that constitute a journal publication in a standard form either from a participating library or directly from the publisher. Scholars Portal… receives and stores permanently all original datasets as distributed from publishers these contain metadata and full-text representations of articles (PDF, XML, SGML)

Measuring Up 2.Store the files in non- proprietary formats that could be easily transferred and used should the participating library decide to change its archives of record Scholars Portal …  Tracks all changes in publisher data formats and stores all DTDs and Schemas so that data can be converted from source files at any time  Binary files (e.g. PDFs) are not “locked” and data can be extracted from them using any number of tools

Measuring Up 3. Use a standard means of verifying the integrity of ingoing and outgoing files, and provide continuing integrity checks for files stored internally Scholars Portal …  Uses a manual process of checking our content against publisher web sites  The loading process logs corrections and deletions as these appear in the publisher datasets  We rely heavily on reports from consortia partners on errors and omissions

Measuring Up 4. Limit the processing of received files, in order to keep costs down, but provide sufficient processing so that the archives could locate and adequately render files for participating libraries in the event of loss. Scholars Portal …  Converts all files to a common schema for the purpose of indexing and access  Dual access is the norm so moving from a “dark” to “light” archive would be trivial

Measuring Up  Restrict access by the participating libraries to archived files that are under copyright in order to protect the publisher ﾕ s business interests, except when (a) the publisher goes out of business or is otherwise unable to provide consistent access or (b) the content is no longer protected by copyright  All licenses that specify perpetual access also have provisions for local loading of the content for access  Access to content is restricted by a system of entitlements

Measuring Up 5. Offer an open, transparent means of auditing these archival practices Scholars Portal … Provides no formal auditing now Verifying the integrity of data is done in a very informal way

What We Would Need to Measure Up?  A means by which we could verify that original datasets have not been tampered with  A policy for the long term preservation of log files to track updates and deletions  Procedures to make all these processes auditable and create a “firewall” between the receipt of data and routine system maintenance activities  Collection and preservation of e-journal content beyond the current subscriptions of the consortium