Registration is currently open for a UK LOCKSS Alliance Members’ Meeting, scheduled for 24th May 2012.
The workshop will be used to update members on activities of the UK LOCKSS Alliance and developments of the LOCKSS software.
We encourage participation from all UKLA member institutions; further information and registration details are available online.
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.
March 2012
The National Science Library, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NSLC) has joined other leading archiving organisations in the Keepers Registry, the international facility which records who is looking after the world’s e-journal content.
Funded by JISC and developed by EDINA (http://edina.ac.uk) and the ISSN-IC (http://www.issn.org), the Keepers Registry is online at http://thekeepers.org.
Established in 1949, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is a leading academic institution and comprehensive research and development centre in natural sciences, technological science and high-tech innovation in China. The National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NSLC) is the public library service system of CAS. NSLC functions as the key library nationally for collecting information resources and providing information services in natural sciences, inter-disciplinary fields, and high tech fields, for the researchers and students of CAS and for the researchers around the country. Learn more at http://english.las.cas.cn
Project Co-Directors Peter Burnhill (EDINA) and Françoise Pelle said, “We are very pleased to welcome the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences into the Keepers Registry, as a sign of their commitment and enthusiasm to help the library community globally.”
With the Keepers Registry providing a single point of access to archiving agency metadata, the library community now has an improved understanding of who is doing what with regards to e-Journal preservation. The Keepers Registry allows library staff to discover which publishers are participating in the NSLC archive and provides an overview of the NSLC’s preservation approach and access conditions.
Seven organizations have now registered as ‘Keepers’, including the British Library, CLOCKSS Archive, e-Depot at the Dutch national library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek), HathiTrust, the Global LOCKSS Network, and Portico. Organizations from Canada and the UK are preparing to join.
About the Keepers Registry: The Keepers Registry Beta service provides easily accessible information about the archiving arrangements for electronic journals. The Keepers Registry is an output of the JISC funded project, Piloting an E-Journals Preservation Registry Service (PEPRS) (http://edina.ac.uk/projects/peprs), and has been jointly developed by EDINA, a national data centre based at the University of Edinburgh, and the ISSN International Centre in Paris. Learn more at http://thekeepers.org
On 31st January 2012, the Digital Preservation Coalition held a workshop to discuss the take-up, acceptance and community trust of e-journal preservation initiatives. Peter Burnhill delivered a presentation discussing the role of the Keepers Registry to report progress made by archiving agencies.
The following day, as part of a meeting convened by JISC, colleagues from ISSN International Centre and EDINA who have been working together in the PEPRS Project to create the Keepers Registry met with representatives from four of the registered “Keepers”: CLOCKSS Archive, KB e-Depot, Global LOCKSS Network and Portico. The purpose was two-fold. For the project staff this was the first opportunity for collective review of progress and shared thoughts about how the “Keepers” might use and benefit from the registry service. For the JISC Programme Manager, Neil Grindley, this was occasion to affirm the interest JISC had in providing continuing support both for the Keepers Registry as an emergent service and for collaboration in tackling the variety of R&D challenges.
EDINA and the ISSN International Centre are pleased to announce the Beta release of the Keepers Registry, the e-journals preservation registry service. The Keepers Registry is available online at http://thekeepers.org.
The Keepers Registry renames and replaces the PEPRS Beta service which was launched in April 2011. The Keepers Registry is the product of JISC-funded project activity and provides freely available means to discover which e-journals are being preserved by the leading archival organisations. The metadata from an additional agency, HathiTrust, has been included in this release of the Keepers Registry, as well as new functionality to support browsing by journal title and publisher.
The PEPRS project was initially funded as a two-year project to scope, design and build a prototype, during which user requirements were gathered from librarians and preservation agencies. The present funding, until July 2012, is geared towards implementation of a service-quality system. Suitable developments from the PEPRS project activity will be implemented into the Keepers Registry.
The work of the PEPRS project and the launch of the Beta release of the Keepers Registry will be discussed at the annual meeting of the Directors of the ISSN National Centres to be held in Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, from 5th – 7th October 2011.
The idea for the registry was mooted in various reports since 2003 and the findings of a JISC-commissioned report carried out by the University of Loughborough and Rightscom and published in 2008. Further background information on the project and details of relevant reports are available on the PEPRS project website at http://edina.ac.uk/projects/peprs/index.html
The six archiving agencies which have been participating in the project and have made metadata available to the PEPRS Beta service include:
It is planned to extend the scope of the service by including metadata from other archiving agencies. Additional functionality will also be added to the service throughout 2011 and 2012 and details of this are set out in the FAQ section on the service.
A programme to test new functionality is being developed and the project team would welcome offers from users to assist in the testing process.
If you would like to get involved please contact us at edina@ed.ac.uk.