Advancing digital preservation practice
CLOCKSS works in collaboration with key partners and participates in projects which help advance digital preservation practice by identifying challenges and ways to mitigate risk.
current projects
APTrust, Chronopolis, CLOCKSS, Educopia, LYRASIS, MetaArchive, and the Texas Digital Library have been awarded a grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). During the project we will study the needs for, and feasibility of, a collaborative community-supported digital preservation service.
The project will enable us to better articulate the need for community-supported, values-driven digital preservation services. We’ll also develop a design for a future shared service model. Along the way we’ll engage stakeholders in planning for the future of digital preservation.
The partners in this project serve over 800 member organizations of varying types and sizes, ranging from university archives to publishers and historical societies. Each is a member of the Digital Preservation Services Collaborative which has published an influential declaration of shared values
Led by David Millman at New York University Libraries, we are part of an array of organizations awarded a grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to deepen our shared exploration and analysis of digital preservation methods and the extent to which we can preserve complex scholarly publications. The goal is to support publishers in making design choices that result in publications, including very complex ones, that can be preserved at scale without sacrificing functionality.
The work follows a recently completed two-year project, also funded by the Mellon Foundation, in which digital preservation practitioners and academic presses, developed digital-publishing guidelines for ensuring effective preservability. The Embedding Preservability project will refine, expand, and operationalize these guidelines.
David Millman explained, “The advance in technologies for publishing digital scholarship has outpaced the development of technologies for reliably preserving it. Authors and publishers are creating increasingly sophisticated products without realizing that some of their enhancement choices might put preservability—and valuable scholarship—at risk.”
For example, today’s digital publications are likely to include dynamic features including embedded audio and video, map navigation, embedded software, and annotating—all of which are at the more challenging end of the preservability spectrum.
In addition to NYU other project partners include CLOCKSS, Fulcrum, the Knowledge Futures Group, LOCKSS, Manifold, Michigan Publishing, Portico, PubPub, RavenSpace, University of British Columbia Press, the University of Michigan Library, and the University of Minnesota Press.
Project JASPER is an initiative to preserve the long tail of open access journals. It was launched in response to research by Mikael Laakso and colleagues demonstrating that online journals can just disappear from the internet. This can happen because of a lack of awareness amongst smaller publishers around the need for long-term digital preservation and/or the resources to enroll a journal in a long-term digital preservation scheme.
Long-term archiving of research resources is of paramount importance for scholarship. Authors want to ensure their contributions to the scholarly record will be permanent. Scholars must be able to access all of the published research in their fields, both now and long into the future.
Project JASPER aims to close the gap in preservation coverage that currently exists among open access journals, and CLOCKSS is delighted to be a project partner along with DOAJ, Internet Archive, Keepers Registry and PKP. Together we have built an easy-to-use system so that publishers of journals indexed in DOAJ can easily preserve their content in CLOCKSS, the Internet Archive, or PKP-PN.