We are delighted to announce that the data submitted by the two latest keepers, the Scholars Portal and the Library of Congress, has now been added to the Keepers Registry.   The addition of these two keepers increases the number of titles listed in the Registry and, with the addition of the Scholars Portal from Canada, another country has been added to the geographical spread of keepers.

Between them, at the latest round of updating carried out earlier this month, the 10 contributing keepers have reported that 23,268 serials are being ‘preserved’ by at least one keeper.  9,652 serials are reported as being ‘preserved’ by at least three keepers.

An earlier post described the Library of Congress and its current work on the preservation of ejournals.  The Scholars Portal became Canada’s first Trusted Digital Repository in February 2013 and a future post will provide more details on the work being carried out.

SUNCAT is based on the bibliographic serials records of a Contributing Library and the associated holdings.  In order to create a clean search result, the records for the same title are put into one set, with the holdings for all records visible at the point of display attached to the best bibliographic record (preferred record). This means that the user, having located a journal in the database, is shown a coherent display of all the holdings information for the contributing libraries.

Building a union catalogue therefore involves establishing which of the submitted records from Contributing Libraries should be matched as they represent the same entity.  The outcome is the creation of a large number of sets, with each set containing all the matched bibliographic records submitted by the Contributing Libraries, along with the associated holdings information. Where there is no match of a record with any other submitted record, the set will contain one record.

Updating a union catalogue involves running a complex set of processes.  The key steps are the following:

1.    For each incoming record the identification of records already in the database for possible matching with each incoming record.  Possible matched records are copied into the ‘Candidate Pool’. The selection of candidates involves utilising 3 direct indexes (LCCN, ISSN/ISBN and a keyword index (normalised index)

2.    Running of processes to ascertain with which records (if any) in the candidate pool the incoming record matches.   This involves running a matching algorithm which compares key elements (title, ISSN etc.) in the incoming record with each record in the candidate pool and assigning numerical values depending on whether or not there is a match between the data elements.  The values for each element are totalled and, when the pre-determined threshold  value is reached, a match is declared.   The matched records are held in the ‘Matched documents buffer’. More information on the matching algorithm is provided here. 

3.    Recording the details of matched records held in the ‘Matched documents buffer’ on the incoming record and the record(s) already in the database.  This is done by each record in the database having an associated table (z120) and this contains information such as the number of records with which it has matched and the system numbers for these matched records.

EDINA had requested some improvements to the processes used to carry out the above and these improvements were included in the Aleph version 20 upgrade carried out in late 2013.  The specific improvements are:

·         New Candidates Pool Size Parameter.  The allowed values are now between 100 and 500.  This has been initially set at 250 meaning that if 250 or fewer records are identified, the process moves onto the matching stage.  If more than 250 candidates are identified the software deems the incoming record not to match and it therefore becomes a single record set.  

·       Candidate Pool Common titles. A new routine has been added to help reduce the number of candidate titles.  All candidate titles are compared with a list of common titles and if there is a match the candidate title is excluded from the candidate pool.

·         Matched Documents Buffer. The size of this has been increased from 100 to 500.  This expansion is necessary as the number of SUNCAT Contributing Libraries increases.

As part of the ongoing SUNCAT software redevelopment, work has already begun on the design of a new, improved matching algorithm.  More information on the approach being taken will be given in a future blog posting. 

From the outset, the focus of PEPRS (the forerunner of the Keepers Registry) and now the Keepers Registry, has been international, reflecting the reality that scholarship and research knows no national boundaries.  Metadata held in the Registry is supplied by keepers from 5 different countries in 3 continents.  It is the mission of EDINA to extend this coverage.

 Of course, it is not only the supply of metadata which needs to be international but also the demand.  That means ensuring the international community knows of the existence of the Registry and what it is trying to do.  A key way to do that is to ensure there are presentations, posters etc, at major international conferences.  A recent post described a presentation at the major international conference for librarians, International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), held in Singapore in August 2013.

 The 10^th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPress-2013) was held in Lisbon in September and was attended by 392 delegates from 37 countries.  During the conference there was a workshop entitled : Preservation of Scale Workshop.  The organisers are to be congratulated on attracting a wide range of speakers from major organisations in the field including:  e-Depot (Netherlands), British Library, LOCKSS, Directory of Open Access Journals, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University and EDINA, University of Edinburgh.

The title of the talk given by one of the Project Directors of the Keepers Registry, Peter Burnhill,  was:  Using the Keepers Registry to assist collaboration between keepers.  The Abstract and Presentation are available.

In his talk Peter Burnhill made reference to the fact that some recent investigations had indicated that around three quarters of the estimated 100,000 e-journals without an ISSN appeared not to be in an archiving programme.

Rick Anderson in a blog post (March 2012) entitled,  E-journal Preservation and Archiving: Whether, How, Who, Which, Where, and When?  posited the question:

“..how important is it that we archive all of the scholarly record?�

This posting attracted 26 comments, many of them quite detailed.

One very useful feature of the iPress-2013 conference website is that the organisers arranged for notes to be available for each of the presentations and for the discussions at the end of each session (there were 4 discussion sessions).   In the discussion after the presentation by Peter Burnhill, there was a question about additional keepers and another one about the contrast with the ‘analogue’ world.  Reference was also made to the role of the legal deposit electronic materials and it was noted that only 44% of national libraries (in 2011) had legislation for e-book or e-journals although that figure was expected to rise to 58% by 2012. 

The comments on the blog post by Rick Anderson and the notes from the conference show clearly that there are a lot of questions appertaining to the digital preservation of electronic journals and that members of the Community wish to engage in discussion.  It is accordingly worth asking how and where the discussions might take place.  Conference proceedings, blog postings, journal articles etc. are all important communication channels but they are essentially passive communication forms (although, as mentioned, blog posts do attract comments) and they require users to know of their existence.  The availability of an internationally recognised, accessible and secure facility to allow such discussions to take place is surely worth considering for an area of activity which is of such importance for scholarly communication. 

The two co-directors of the Keepers Registry, Peter Burnhill (EDINA, University of Edinburgh) and Françoise Pelle (ISSN International Centre / Centre International de l’ISSN, Paris) gave a presentation entitled:

“Who is looking after your e-journals? Telling tales about the Keepers Registry and your digital shelves�

at the 79^th IFLA World Library and Information Congress held in Singapore 17^th – 23^rd August 2013.  The presentation was given in Session 98 entitled Agile management: strategies for achieving success in rapidly changing times.  This was organised by the Knowledge Management with Academic and Research Libraries Group.

The presentation is available here and there is also a supporting document providing background information and more detailed information on the Keepers Registry.

A blog posting by one of the delegates at the Breakout session entitled E-journals and long-term availability: an overview and panel discussion on the archiving infrastructure to meet the needs of users given at UKSG 2013 has now been made available.