Expanding the Preservation Network: Lessons from Portico

Portico, a digital preservation archive for the scholarly community and a National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) partner, has successfully extended the NDIIPP network to include a diverse and broad set of publishers and libraries through the development of a model that encourages institutions of all sizes to participate in digital preservation. Over the past two and a half years of archive operations, Portico has learned a number of lessons—most importantly that responsiveness to community needs is key to successful preservation. Defining the Risk: Assured Access to Scholarly Resources Requires New Infrastructure In recent years, academic libraries’ expenditures to purchase or license digital content for their communities have increased dramatically. Between 1993 and 2006, electronic materials expenditures at the libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) increased over five times more rapidly than total library materials expenditures (LME), and in the 2005–6 academic year, these libraries spent an average 41 percent of total LME on eresources. Twenty-three ARL libraries spent more than 50 percent of their materials budget on electronic resources (fig. 1; Kyrillidou & Young, 2008). The average percentage of LME that the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) institutions devoted to e-resources in the 2003–4 academic year was only slightly smaller than the ARL institutions (see fig. 2). These expenditures are driven in part by the dramatic increase in faculty reliance on digital resources over the past decade, which can be seen through responses to various faculty surveys over the past thirteen years: Expanding the Preservation Network: Lessons from Portico