ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) announced today that it is providing its institutional library customers with advanced electronic archiving services to preserve their valuable electronic resources. These services, provided by Portico and CLOCKSS, address the scholarly community’s critical need for long-term solutions that assure reliable, secure, deliverable access to their burgeoning digital collection of scholarly works. ACM is offering these services to protect the vast online collection of resources in its Digital Library (DL), which are used by over 1 million computing professionals and students worldwide.
"By partnering with Portico and CLOCKSS, we are able to meet a growing demand in the library community for a trusted, reliable third-party archive, and to ensure that digital collections remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students," said Scott Delman, ACM Group Publisher. “Scientific discovery and the educational process are not possible without reliable access to the accumulated scholarship of the past and secure preservation of the scholarly record, and these agreements are a clear step forward with the relationship between the ACM and the library community."
By investing in long-term digital preservation of content, ACM’s aim is to make it easier for libraries to accelerate their transition away from print and free up resources invested in print collections in favor of new and innovative electronic products and services.
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Portico’s primary preservation methodology is migration, which involves transitioning content from one file format to another as technology changes and as file formats become obsolete. Their archival approach begins with receipt of source files, which comprise the intellectual content of electronic scholarly journals, directly from publishers, and features transformation or "normalization" of these diverse files to a standard archival format which can be reliably managed over the long term.
“ACM’s investment in Portico to secure the long-term preservation of their vast digital collections is a tremendously positive development for libraries,” said Eileen Fenton, Portico Managing Director. “The hundreds of libraries around the world that participate in Portico can focus on building their digital collections and re-purposing monies related to print-based expenses knowing that ACM digital content is safe-guarded and will be accessible to them in the future if needed.”
CLOCKSS uses Archive Nodes, which are housed at libraries selected to be the custodians of the archived content, and at institutions that have existed for decades, if not centuries. Archive nodes are located in geographically, politically, and geologically disparate locations in North America, Europe, and Asia. The CLOCKSS archive is governed by the participating publishers and libraries, and supports the library's role in society as a "custodian of culture."
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