The document discusses the challenges academic libraries face in preserving digital e-journals as a growing portion of scholarly records shifts online, which comes with risks of digital decay and loss. It emphasizes the importance of a global registry to identify who is archiving digital content and highlights the need for collaboration among libraries, publishers, and archiving organizations to ensure preservation. The document also outlines the current state of e-serials, with a significant percentage considered at risk and calls for actions to improve archival efforts by 2020.

1. Identify
each
point of
issue
(stream)
- with
ISSN
Who is looking after your e-journals?
Telling Tales About The Keepers Registry
& Your Digital Shelves
Peter Burnhill (& Françoise Pelle)
EDINA, University of Edinburgh, UK
(ISSN International Centre / Centre International de l'ISSN, Paris, France)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Adapted from presentation given to IFLA2013
+ some things I have learnt at iPrs2013

2. … is to ensure ease and continuity of access to
the scholarly & cultural record
And we all know what has changed …
• a significant/growing proportion of that scholarly & cultural
record is in digital format and available across the Web
• Good News  What was once availablylocallyis now online
& accessed remotely, anytime/anywhere
• Bad News!  Academic libraries are no longer the custodians
of the scholarly record
– What is on the Web one day is changed or disappeared the next
– We need to invest in some digital shelves!
Key task for academic & research libraries

3. Focus on international challenge of e-journals
Researchers (and therefore libraries) in any one country
are dependent upon content written and published in other countries
US.LoC 20%
UK.BL 10%
‘hidden’ e-journals:
low % ISSN
Netherlands
& Germany:
c. 4.5% each
Brazil 4%
%age of the 100,000 ISSN issued for e-serials

4. Many Reports over past 10 Years …
They highlighted risks in digital media & formats:
• ‘digital decay’: format obsolescence & bit rot
and warned against single points of failure:
• natural disasters (earthquake, fire and flood)
• human folly (criminal and political action): hacking
+ risks associated with commercial events in the
publisher/supply chain
• eDepot at Koninklijke Bibliotheek
• international significance (Elsevier & Kluwer) as well as national
role for The Netherlands)
• the LOCKSS project at Stanford University
• from which came CLOCKSS
• the Electronic-Archiving Initiative at JSTOR
• from which came Portico
… as early archiving initiatives emergedThose reports mentioned the idea of a Registry
“by which it would be plain what content was being archived, and
therefore what was not” (CLIR Report, 2006)
In 2008, Jisc, acting on behalf of UK universities, commissioned a Study
which confirmed the need for such a Registry.
In 2009, EDINA & ISSN-IC began to design that Registry,
working with e-Depot, LOCKSS, CLOCKSS & Portico
• We reported recently at IFLA2013, Singapore

5. ISSN
Register
E-J Preservation Registry Service
E-Journal
Preservation
Registry
SERVICES: user
requirements
(a)
(b)
Data
dependency
ISSN-L as
kernel field
METADATA
on extant e-journals
METADATA
on preservation action
ISSN Register at the heart of the Data Model
(Taken from Figure 1 in reference paper in Serials, March 2009)
Digital Preservation
Agencies
e.g. CLOCKSS, Portico; BL, KB;
UK LOCKSS Alliance etc.

6. http://thekeepers.org
Enter title
or ISSN
to search across metadata
reported by leading
archiving organisations
- Now include digitised journals
… to discover who is looking after what

7. 7
… but coverage
of volumes is
partial & patchy
This e-journal is being archived
by 5 archiving agencies …
Example search: ‘Origins of Life’
… and discover details of its ‘archival status’

8. Using metadata reported by all Keepers …
… we note that
c.21,000 e-serials
are reported as
being ‘preserved’
=> Does this mean that 79% of the 100,000
e-serials assigned with ISSN are at risk of loss?
being kept ?

9. Look into the future with 2020 Vision …
• Best Case scenario for IFLA 2020
– Libraries (& Publishers) have acted to reduce that
alarming 79% figure down to near to zero 
– All e-journal content now used by researchers in 2013
has been preserved & can be successfully used in 2020,
and assuredly beyond for future generations. 
• Worst Case scenario for IFLA 2020
– Libraries (& Publishers) have failed to act 
– Important literature has been lost 
– Citizens & scholars complain of neglect!

10. Reminder about the real heroes in the story,
3 types of Keeper:
① web-scale not-for-profit archiving agencies
e.g. CLOCKSS Archive* & Portico* [*project start]
② national libraries (sometimes with legal deposit in mind)
e.g. e-Depot* (Netherlands); British Library*
& National Science Library of China
③ research libraries: consortia & specialist centres
e.g. Global LOCKSS Network*, HathiTrust,
Scholars Portal, Archaeology Data Service
*news* US Library of Congress in process of joining

11. Many archiving organisations is a Good Thing 
“Digital information is best preserved by replicating it at
multiple archives run by autonomous organizations”
B. Cooper and H. Garcia-Molina (2002)
The Keepers Registry acts as the global lens onto
their activity: so we can all know who is looking after
what, and what is still at risk …
Kaisu!

12. What does the Registry tell about progress?
• c.100,000 ISSN for online resources
– but expect / hope to identify many more
• Is there such thing as a ‘priority list’ of titles?
– c.30,000 refereed scholarly journals
• Do we look at on what individual libraries list?
– In 2012 we checked ‘archival status’ for 3 large university libraries
• Two key indicators: %age (& number) of titles that are ‘at risk of loss’
%age (& number) of titles that are ‘preserved by 3 or more Keepers’.
c.75%
‘at risk’
c.11%
kept by
3 or more
*news* In new release of the online Registry, each and every
library can ‘upload & compare’ to discover what of their
collection is ‘being kept’, or is ‘at risk of loss’.

13. What else can the Registry tell about progress?
• c.100,000 ISSN for online resources
– but expect / hope to identify many more
• Is there such thing as a ‘priority list’ of titles?
– c.30,000 refereed scholarly journals
• Do we look at on what individual libraries list?
– In 2012 we checked ‘archival status’ for 3 large university libraries
• Two key indicators: %age (& number) of titles that are ‘at risk of loss’
%age (& number) of titles that are ‘preserved by 3 or more Keepers’.
c.75%
‘at risk’
c.11%
held by
3 or more
Look at the problem from users’ point of view …
… with online usage (OpenURL requests) as guide to priority
*Latest but Provisional (so do not cite)*
Analysis of > 10.4m full text OpenURL requests by researchers and
student from 111 (of 160+) UK institutions in 2012 (using the UK OpenURL
Router logs and the ISSN-L to de-duplicate ISSN entries) shows:
53,311 online titles were consulted in 2012, of which:
only 14.7% (7,862) are ‘being kept’ by 3 or more Keepers
one third (32% : 16,985) by at least one; two thirds (68% : 36,326) held by none.
> 36,000 titles ‘at risk’ of loss 
• Check robustness with UK logs for 2011 & 2013 [and monitor annually]
• Assess generalisability with OpenURL logs for other countries
=> Support action: disclose the journals & the publishers!

14. Sidebar note on monitoring their progress …Your Priorities for The Keepers Registry?
• Need to establish international, multi-sector governance
– building on Jisc funding, the Registry must command consensus & be
sustainable over the long-term. Who then should govern & fund this?
1. Make sure the Keepers Registry serves your needs
– Periodic report of those 2 key indicators: :
• %age (& number) of titles that are ‘at risk of loss’
• %age (& number) of titles that are ‘preserved by 3 or more Keepers’
– Making clear terms of access to orphaned content
• preferably available to all ‘open access’ across the Internet
– Listing the serial titles ‘at risk’
– Disclosing the relevant publishers to assist libraries & archiving agencies
– …

15. Sidebar note on monitoring their progress …Your Priorities for The Keepers Registry?
• Need to establish international, multi-sector governance
– building on Jisc funding, the Registry must command consensus & be
sustainable over the long-term. Who then should govern & fund this?
1. Make sure the Keepers Registry serves your needs
2. Close focus on volumes & issues: completeness takes hard work!
3. Assist the ISSN Network assign more ISSN [& start to use URN?]
– If it is worth preserving, it should have an identifier: ‘hidden e-journals’
4. Encourage more organisations to be Keepers in the Registry
– including every national library that acts as an archive
 The Registry is not an audit / certification authority but need for
eligibility checks for integrity of ‘archival intent’
5. Assist collaboration between Keepers in ‘a safe places
network’: many are meeting at iPres 2013 in Lisbon in September

16. – Yes lah!
• More and more scholarly statement is issued on the Web
• Often with no obvious ‘country of publication’
– New ‘scholarly objects’; rich in data or with dependent links to data
– Increasing use of HTTP URL/URI to cite resources & work of others
– Content at URI can and does change, or even cease to be
• R&D at Mellon-funded Hiberlink project at U. of Edinburgh / LANL
• and more and more is Open Access
– issued in OA journals or via repositories such as Arkiv
• and then there is the Internet Archive, and figshare, and ..
– Is someone else running the global library of the future?
 But still necessary to preserve e-journal content!
 Still sufficient in the mainstream, although should also engage with the ‘new now’
Surely, Scholarly Record is more than e-journals?

17. Securing the future with 2020 Vision…
Actions needed to achieve good news at IFLA 2020
– to reduce that alarming 75% ‘at risk’ figure down towards zero
• Individual actions by each research library
– give material support to one or more archiving agency
– consider an ‘archive clause’ in licences
• requiring publishers to deposit content with an archiving organisation
• As a coalition of research libraries & memory organisations
– to develop that model ‘archive clause’ requiring deposit with an archive
– to engage with publisher associations, internationally and nationally
• Many e-journals are from small publishers: ‘long tail problem’
• Role for consortia and/or subscription agents?
– to act globally, not leaving matters to each country
• Using legal deposit in national library as a back-up
• Use the Keepers Registry to monitor progress

18. Identify
each
content
stream
with an
ISSN
Or with
URN?
Thank you for listening
http://thekeepers.org
New release in September

19. * Legal Deposit: a sidebar note
Should we wait upon that and action by National Libraries?
• 44% national libraries had legislation in 2011 for e-books or e-
journals; expected to rise to 58% by June 2012.
• But only 27% [expected to rise to 37% by June 2012] actually
ingesting via legal deposit
 Others have collected by voluntary deposit (esp.Netherlands)
 Key point is not to object to the call for ‘legal deposit’,
but it is taking too much time, and is not sufficient
 Even if the slowness is usually down to the actions of government and
publishers, not the national libraries.
 Only KB e-Depot, BL, NSLC (+ LoC) in The Keepers Registry
 Need to encourage others to join so we will all know about their activity
from presentation, CENL 2011 Survey by Lynne Brindley
to CDNL Annual Meeting Puerto Rico, 15/8/11
*Reminder* Researchers (and therefore libraries) in any one country
are dependent upon content written and published in other countries