E-Journal Archiving and Preservation Workshop

Article on Overview of E-journal Archiving and Preservation Workshop, UKSG, Serials 20 (3) November 2007

Overview and Presentations

The DPC, The British Library and JISC held a 1 day workshop looking at the issue of e-journal archiving and preservation. The workshop brought together international stakeholders from the information world, including publishers, librarians and representatives from archiving solution providers. The day was chaired by Hazel Woodward of Cranfield University and provided an opportunity to review what initiatives are currently in place and what more developments are needed.

The first morning session saw Anne Kenney (PDF 519KB) of Cornell University provide an overview of the e-journal archiving landscape, drawing on work that was done in 2006 to pull together the opinions of library directors and also provide a detailed review of 12 archiving solutions. This was followed by presentations from 4 different providers of archiving and preservation services. Victoria Reich (PDF 13MB) , Director of the LOCKSS program, gave an overview of LOCKSS and CLOCKSS and emphasised that the more archived copies of an item the safer it is. Eileen Fenton (PDF 593KB), Executive Director of Portico, described the service provided by Portico which archives peer review scholarly journals and to date has more than 5,800 journals from 30 publishers. Erik Oltmans (PDF 377KB), Head of Acquisitions and Cataloguing at the National Library of Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) spoke of the e-deport service which from a starting point in 1995 is now ingesting 50,000 items a day. The UK national library perspective was given by Richard Boulderstone (PDF 418KB), Director of e-Strategy at The British Library, who showed that the traditional scholarly communication process is changing and this requires new processes and durable technical architecture to ensure that archiving solutions are able to satisfy requirements now and in the future.

The afternoon session saw presentations from the publisher and university library perspectives. Steven Hall (PDF 156KB), Commerical Director at Wiley-Blackwell, demonstrated that publishers take the issue of archiving seriously but there needs to be more clarification when it comes to access. Preservation is not the same as access and access is not the same as open access. Paul Ayris (PDF 440KB), Director of Library Services at UCL, said that UCL were moving towards the e-only delivery of journals and therefore were reviewing what solutions need to be in place to ensure continued access. Paul also highlighted the potential costs of archiving.

The workshop finished with a question and answer session which enabled delegates to pose questions to the expert panel and Hazel Woodward brought the day to an end by summarising the themes of the day.

Morning session: The E-Journal Preservation Landscape
Chair: Hazel Woodward

Afternoon session: High-level Principles of E-journal Archiving and Preservation Services
Chair: Hazel Woodward