The British Library and digital preservation specialist Portico have announced that they will be working together to ensure that thousands of electronic journal titles will be collected, preserved and made available to current and future generations of researchers.
The partnership will help the British Library - along with five other legal deposit libraries - to meet regulations that recently became law in the United Kingdom and that extend the practice of legal deposit from traditional print publications to non-print publications such as e-journals, blogs and websites in the UK web domain.
Portico will utilise its established workflow and processes to create standardised and uniform journal content that can be exported to the British Library. They have started with 1,500 journals from three publishers that are already preserving content with Portico. As necessary, Portico will develop new tools for processing additional publisher content.
The British Library and Portico began their work together through a pilot project in 2012. The two organisations developed their systems as part of the pilot and were thus able to 'turn on' automatic delivery of content to the British Library as soon as the legislation passed.
