The British Library e-Journal Digital Archive

Why sign up to the British Library Digital Archive?

The British Library has identified a need to provide a digital archive for publishers’ electronic journal content. The user community is demanding perpetual access to the content it subscribes to and publishers are being pressured to guarantee future access. As a well-established organisation with a mandate to archive electronic content combined with strong technical expertise we can act as a trusted archiving partner to ensure that access is available to the user community, should the publisher be unable to provide ongoing access (according to the publisher’s policy).

What are the Library’s mission and values?

As one of the world’s greatest libraries we have the necessary mandate, resources and skills to ensure the continued development of a first-class archiving solution. We provide publishers with the assurance they require for the future archiving and preservation of their electronic content. Our strong relationships with publishers and libraries means that we have the experience and knowledge to deliver a service that is sustainable whilst being flexible to satisfy publisher and library requirements.

What happens next?

If you are interested in signing up to the Digital Archive service the first step is to contact the British Library using the contact details listed below. We would then request that a test file is submitted so that we can assess your archiving and preservation requirements. Once an agreement has been signed content should be delivered to the Digital Archive as soon as it is published, according to agreed schedules.

Key facts

Storage

Content will be stored using the British Library Digital preservation system, which has been developed to store digital objects in perpetuity. Ingested content will be normalised for preservation purposes but also retained in the format that it has been sent to the Library. To ensure that data is as safe as possible, the DOM system has 3 nodes or repositories. A copy of the content (digital object) will be retained at each. This means that if one copy is lost the content can be extracted from another node much more quickly than if data has to be pulled from an offline backup. Each repository makes a continuous ‘round robin’ validity check of all digital items. This check uses the digital signature (computed for the item when it was initially ingested), and thus provides a highly reliable local test against any data loss or corruption. If the digital signature does not agree with the content, the item is recovered from another node. The DOM system will be OAIS compliant.

For more detailed technical information, please see the Technical Information (see link on the right).

Rights and permissions

Access to content will be secured by a digital policy management (DPM) module. This will ensure that intellectual property rights are not infringed and that only appropriate access is enabled.

Access

Access to ingested content will depend on publisher requirements. Currently we have 2 levels of service:

Grey Archive: British Library Reading Room access to content only
Light Archive: Reading Room access and end user access on the occurrence of a trigger event. Publishers may define access delay post-trigger event, but typically these are 6 months. Content will be opened to the web for open access worldwide.

Trigger events

Trigger events may include:

Publisher goes out of business
Publisher prompts for access to be opened up, for instance if their hosting platform fails
A title is no longer published
Publisher no longer offers backlist material

Preservation

In order to ensure long term preservation continual work is undertaken to evaluate the appropriate preservation techniques. The initial focus of this work is on file format migration, but efforts in emulation, universal computing, and other methods are being followed closely. Potential digital preservation actions will be triggered in a number of ways, such as manual intervention, an automated technology watch service, and specific messages from software vendors. In all cases the initiation of the migration operation will be verified to ensure that large parts of the collection are not transformed unnecessarily. The originally ingested version of the content will always be retained, but the newest version of an object will normally be accessed in preference to older versions. The British Library is a leading partner in the Planets project which is working to produce a framework for the long-term preservation of digital content. Planets will enable organisations to improve decision-making about long term preservation, ensure long-term access to their valued digital content and control the costs of preservation actions through increased automation and scaleable infrastructure. The Planets consortium, which consists of European national libraries, research institutions and technology companies estimates that EU member countries produce around 5 billion documents per year; of this total, around 2% (100 million documents per year) comprise information that is worth archiving. Around 2 million documents out of this sub-total are held in formats that constitute a long-term preservation risk. Central to the PLANETS ideology is that organisations should work together to preserve content.

Pricing

The e-Journal Digital Archive will provide a cost effective service. Publishers can be assured that they will satisfy the demands of their subscribers with a pricing model that does not charge other libraries.