As of April 16th, the seven registered Keepers across the globe are reporting having  ingested and ‘Preserved’ one or more volumes (issues) for nearly 17,000 (16,888) unique Serial Titles (see definition below). In all there is some kind of archival action being taken for about 20,000 (20,378) unique Serial Titles, including reports of ‘In progress’ for almost 10,000 (9,886) Serials by the various Keepers. The status ‘In progress’ is given until the archiving agency provides specific volume information to the Keepers Registry.

However, the extent preserved for a given Serial varies greatly. In future we hope to assist by providing overlap statistics that highlight missing volumes. That requires work on ‘holdings’ and knowledge of the ‘ever issued’.

We have included facilities to upload a list of ISSNs and compare against the contents of the Keepers Registry in our Roadmap for 2012/13, so we should then be able to allow libraries to establish what the preservation status for what matters most for them.

The summary counts provided here include serials issued by publishers as e-serials and being archived by six of the Keepers plus a much smaller number of (usually older) print serials that have been digitised.

At present the Keepers Registry only records archival action for serials that have had an ISSN assigned. Fortunately nearly 100,000 have been assigned to e-serials by members of the ISSN Network, and this includes the vast majority of e-journals. Nevertheless, not all electronic versions of serials have yet been assigned their own ISSN (the eISSN): Of the 20,378 online serials reported, 15,181 had an e-ISSN assigned: 5,195 only had the print ISSN – and that includes many of the ‘digitised journals’. Conversely, 1,359 had only an eISSN; that is, they were online only.

The ISSN-L is the linking field that co-relates ISSNs for the print and online version of the same serial title (the latter sometimes called eISSNs). We use the occurrence of ISSN-Ls as the count of unique serial titles.