LC Awards $3M to Portico

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Of possible interest to readers.
____________________________________

October 4, 2005

Contact:  Guy Lamolinara, Library of Congress (202) 707-9217; glam@loc.gov
Contact:  Eileen Fenton, Portico (609) 258-8355; eileen.fenton@portico.org

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ANNOUNCES AWARD OF $3 MILLION TO PORTICO,
A NONPROFIT ELECTRONIC ARCHIVING SERVICE

Electronic Scholarly Resources to Be Preserved

The Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure and
Preservation Program (NDIIPP) announced today that it is making a $3
million grant award for the development of Portico, a nonprofit electronic
archiving service being developed by Ithaka.  Ithaka is a nonprofit
organization with offices in New York City and Princeton, N.J., that
provides a range of services to assist in the creation and development of
promising new projects that benefit higher education. 

This award from the Library of Congress will be used to support Portico's
development of the archive's technical infrastructure and an economically
sustainable business model for a continuing archiving service for
scholarly resources published in electronic form, beginning with
electronic scholarly journals.  The Library award will be matched
dollar-for-dollar by Ithaka, which has also received funding for Portico
from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and JSTOR, whose broad mission is to
help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in information
technology and whose activities include responsibility for digitizing,
preserving and providing access to an extensive archives of research
literature.

The award advances two fundamental goals of the Library's massive digital
preservation program, which was mandated by Congress: to develop a
technical infrastructure to support long-term preservation of digital
content and to foster the development of new business models for digital
preservation services. "The Library of Congress is pleased to support this
important infrastructure initiative for libraries and publishers," said
Associate Librarian for Strategic Initiatives Laura E. Campbell, who is
leading NDIIPP for the Library of Congress.  "As scholarly materials are
increasingly being created in digital form, it becomes ever more critical
to foster the development of multiple technological and economic solutions
to the challenges of digital preservation.  Portico's efforts are an
important step in exploring new strategies for ensuring that content will
be preserved for future generations."  

"Preservation of electronic resources will require significant levels of
collaboration among many constituents in our community," said Eileen
Fenton, executive director of Portico, "but it is work that is absolutely
essential to the long-term health of the academic enterprise.  I am
pleased that the Library of Congress recognizes the importance of the
problem and is looking to Portico to play a key role in contributing to
the solution.  Portico is singularly focused on developing the
technological infrastructure and economic framework necessary to sustain
its important archiving service for the very long term.  A collaborative
relationship with the Library of Congress is a valuable component of that
effort, and we look forward to working with the Library in the years
ahead."  For more than a decade, scholarly publishers have been creating
electronic journals in response to demands from libraries and scholars for
innovative information resources.  Even as electronic journals and other
electronic resources have become a significant part of the scholarly
record upon which future students and researchers must rely, it has
remained unclear precisely how these resources will be preserved for the
long term.  Portico is developing a new community-based approach to
solving the problem of preserving these important electronic scholarly
resources.

BACKGROUND - National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation
Program

In December 2000 Congress authorized the Library of Congress to develop
and execute a congressionally approved plan for a National Digital
Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.  A $99.8 million
congressional appropriation was made to establish the program. According
to Conference Report (H. Rept. 106-1033), "The overall plan should set
forth a strategy for the Library of Congress, in collaboration with other
federal and nonfederal entities, to identify a national network of
libraries and other organizations with responsibilities for collecting
digital materials that will provide access to and maintain those
materials. As a condition of developing this strategy, the plan shall set
forth, in concert with the Copyright Office, the policies, protocols and
strategies for the long-term preservation of such materials, including the
technological infrastructure required at the Library of Congress."  The
goal is to build a network of committed partners working through a
preservation architecture with defined roles and responsibilities.

The complete text of the "Plan for the National Digital Information
Infrastructure and Preservation Program" is available at
www.digitalpreservation.gov. This includes an explanation of how the plan
was developed, who the Library worked with to develop the plan and the key
components of the digital preservation infrastructure. The plan was
approved by Congress in December 2002.

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world.  Through its
National Digital Library (NDL) Program, it is also one of the leading
providers of noncommercial intellectual content on the Internet
(www.loc.gov). The NDL Program's flagship American Memory project, in
collaboration with other institutions nationwide, makes freely available
more than 10 million American historical items.

About Portico 

Portico's program mission is to preserve scholarly literature published in
electronic form and to ensure that these materials remain accessible to
future generations of scholars, researchers and students
(www.portico.org).  Portico was launched by JSTOR (www.jstor.org) and is
currently being developed with support from JSTOR and Ithaka, a nonprofit
organization that incubates promising new projects benefiting higher
education (www.ithaka.org).  Additional support for Portico is provided by
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (www.mellon.org).

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10-4-05
ISSN 0731-3527