Evaluating Your Preservation Options
Portico is one of several organizations providing digital preservation services for the academic community. We know that you need to evaluate options and that doing so can be challenging. What questions should you ask? What criteria are important? Below we offer some help by providing a comparison of participation and the content in Portico to other services as well as a report on how Portico meets key factors necessary for digital preservation established by third-party preservation experts, Anne Kenny and Richard Entlich, and first published by CLIR in 2006. Factual information on other services is gathered and updated from public sources.
List of Preservation Options
Governing Structure Table
| Evaluation Factors | Portico Response |
|---|---|
Mission and MandateThe repository should have both an explicit mission and the necessary mandate to perform long-term archiving. |
Portico preserves scholarly literature published in electronic form and ensures that these materials remain accessible to future scholars, researches, and students. This purpose statement can be found on the website at URL to purpose statement. Portico is part of ITHAKA a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. |
Organizational ViabilityRepositories must be organizationally viable. Three attributes in particular relate to the viability of any archiving effort: administrative responsibility, organizational viability, and financial sustainability. |
In terms of administrative responsibility, Portico’s content model and processes are informed by a number of community standards, including: METS, DIDL, OAIS, and TRAC.
Portico also has a diversified funding stream from more than 600 libraries and over 80 publishers (representing over 2000 societies and associations) and a commitment to good business practices with short- and long-term financial planning, including annual financial audits. |
NetworkRepositories will work as part of a network. |
Portico believes that collaborative development is a keystone of success. Portico and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands – KB) have an agreement whereby the KB preserves an off-line copy of the Portico archive. Portico consults regularly with the KB, the Library of Congress, the British Library, and other members of the digital preservation community. Portico is a participant in the development of JHOVE (a file characterization tool) and the Global Digital Format Repository. |
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