We’re delighted to be featured on The Signal, the digital preservation blog published by the Library of Congress, this month.
‘Mapping the Digital Galaxy: The Keepers Registry Expands its Tool Kit‘ is an interview with the team conducted by Ted Westervelt, manager of the eDeposit Program for Library Services at the Library of Congress, who will be speaking at Taking the Long View: International Perspectives on E-Journal Archiving.
The resulting conversation ranged from the history of the Keepers Registry to our new release and current plans for engaging more archiving agencies and libraries: below we repost a few extracts.
Ted: Most of the participating agencies are Western European or North American, which makes sense given the origins of the Keepers Registry. How actively are you looking at adding members from other parts of the world?
Keepers team: We have become well-traveled in our quest! The initial focus was on the UK, Europe and the USA as it was much easier for us to encourage participation from agencies in Europe and the US as we had existing contact and relationships with many of the original agencies. However, we are very conscious of need for more international participation as mentioned earlier. There is now engagement with China and Canada and with active outreach to India and Brazil, as well as more countries across Europe.
Ted: You are just now releasing a new version of the Keepers Registry, with some interesting new functionalities. One of these is the Title List Comparison, which you mentioned above. Who do you hope will use this and what do you hope this will do for them and for the mission of the Keepers Registry in general?
Keepers team: We anticipate that the Title List Comparison facility will prove very popular. […It] should allow libraries to have insight into the archival status of collections in order to assist informed decision making about subscriptions, cancellations and print rationalization. We hope that the tool will also improve communication between the library community and the Keeper organizations themselves, as libraries make known their priorities for the serial titles that they discover are not being kept safe. The Title List Comparison service is part of our Members Services; access to these requires membership, which is free of charge.
Ted: Another major functionality in the new release is the Machine to Machine Interfaces. Who do you expect will use this? What outcome would you like to see from launching this?
Keepers team: Librarians interact on a daily basis with a wide range of services and tools for serials. We want the information on archiving that we bring together in the Keepers Registry to be available and useful at the point of need – when there is need for a quick reference to make a measured decision. Those machine-to-machine interfaces are there to support linking tools from those other services, such as union catalogs, and even OPACs, as well as vendor platforms. In general, those ‘APIs’ are there so that others can do unimaginable things with our data – so please get in touch!
