Keepers Extra

As part of the initial research for the Keepers Extra project we have been speaking to archiving agencies about their use of the Keepers Registry and about the global digital preservation landscape more generally. Several common themes have emerged from these discussions.  We were delighted to hear that the Keepers Registry is highly regarded among the Keeper agencies and potential Keepers, and viewed as an important service and a way to increase the visibility of work in the field of digital preservation. There is wide recognition that the Keepers Registry occupies a unique position in having established productive working relationships with many major archiving agencies, and that this is a positive position from which to facilitate communication and collaboration.

There was also broad consensus on the need for more discussion between the Keepers, particularly around the areas of standardisation of data and tackling the long tail. Many of the Keeper agencies wish to use the Keepers Registry in order to analyse gaps and overlaps in what is being preserved. For some, this would be a way of analysing their own collections with a view to working at the title level to complete runs of particular journals. For others, it would offer a way to identify material ‘at risk of loss’ and therefore a way to prioritise publishers or titles for preservation. In both cases, doing such analyses quickly and efficiently depends on being able to access easily comparable data, so a better standardisation of data would be very helpful. This would also assist the sharing of data and impact on the ways in which an API could be used to integrate the Keepers Registry information into other systems and processes.

A further common theme was the challenge of preserving the ‘long tail’ of e-journals produced by small publishers and bodies such as academic societies or university departments. The key issues here are funding, scalability (or lack thereof), and division of labour. Reaching out to small publishers takes a lot of resources, human and financial, so this work is expensive. For every publisher that an agency works with, there are negotiations around a contract and costs around setting up technology and establishing protocols. If that publisher produces 300 journals, there is an economy of scale that justifies the cost. However, if that publisher produces only one journal, it suddenly becomes a very expensive process indeed. In such a context, having multiple agencies spend those resources on the same material seems illogical, yet there is no established way for agencies to cooperate to ensure as broad a coverage as possible. So there seem to be two potential ways of approaching this challenge: on the one hand finding ways to scale up the work and, on the other, finding ways to meet or lower the costs.

To accompany development of a new release of the Keepers Registry, we have been conducting a number of consultation exercises to gather feedback from our users. One of the key points that emerged from these interviews is that use of the Keepers Registry has been incidental rather than systematic. Librarians and archivists have turned to Keepers Registry when they have needed to investigate the archival status of a single title or publisher, or when they have had a one-off task to complete, such as checking the preservation of numerous titles as part of a project to analyse collections and make decisions about withdrawals. While the filters we currently have allow them to do this, having to work at the level of single title or publisher makes the registry less practical for regular, large-scale analysis.

Two of the tools that we are currently working on are designed to address this issue. Our member services area, now undergoing final testing before public release, features two services designed to enable users to work with collection lists and larger scale holdings data. A title list comparison tool allows users to upload a list of titles with ISSNs and get a tailored report of the preservation status of the collection.

We have been trialling an early version of this since last summer and with some more development work completed recently, including an improved registration process, we are about to begin user testing with a view to launching the tool later this spring. Once registered, users can find guidance on preparing their data and case studies of how such data can be used. Librarians can upload lists generated from their library catalogue and then receive a report identifying how many of those titles have been preserved. As part of the Keepers Extra project we’ve started looking at how to return this information via a more manageable online interface, adding useful filters and more intuitive data visualisations.

Also forthcoming is an API that will allow data from the Keepers Registry to be integrated with other services used by libraries. This will be released at the same time as the Title List Comparison feature, and we’re looking forward to working with service providers to see how this data can be integrated more directly into library workflows.
If you would be interested in testing the title list comparison tool or have feedback that you’d like to share, please get in touch.