Article Summary: "Tales from the Keepers Registry"


Burnhill, Peter. “Tales from the Keepers Registry: Serial Issues About Archiving and the Web.” Elsevier, 2013.

Archival collections are increasingly held in digital form. They are not taking up valuable space, but they also seem invisible and remote – out of sight, out of mind. It is therefore hard to see what digital items are deteriorating before it is too late. This article describes the efforts of the Keeper’s Registry, which supports long-term access by keeping a registry of items and the institution maintaining them. The article is separated into what the author calls three “stories”: (1) the development of the Keeper’s Registry, (2) metadata issues, and (3) what the future holds for the Keeper’s Registry and the bigger picture of archiving web content.

The Keeper’s Registry is a product of the PEPRS project (Pilot an E-journal Preservation Registry Service). The Registry allows users to discover who is preserving an e-journal by searching the title or ISSN of a serial. The Keeper’s Registry is ISSN-focused because it is the product of a collaboration between EDINA and the ISSN IC, which manages the ISSN register. Other associate partners participate as well, such as CLOCKSS, Portico, the Global LOCKSS Network, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the British Library, HathiTrust, and the National Library of Science of the Chinese Academy of the Sciences. As far as what the Registry contains, Burnhill summarizes, “metadata in a preservation registry would consist of periodic self-statements by the archival organizations themselves: on what they held and how, including mention of any reports of audit and certifications" (5-6). Libraries and archives might contact publishers whose content appears to be at risk, expanding the scope of the registry beyond institutional holdings.

Burnhill addresses a number of challenges dealing with metadata and serials. 

  •  Uncertainty about identifiers: the requirement of a valid ISSN means that content without an ISSN (especially content in India/Chine) remains hidden
  • ISSN can be incorrect or missing
  • The print ISSN may be incorrectly used instead of the “eISSN”
  • ISSN may be omitted by archiving agencies
  • ISSN may not yet be assigned


When the Keeper’s Registry began working with HathiTrust, they had to decide whether digitized forms of print serials needed new ISSNs. They ultimately decided that if a digital version of a serial exists with an ISSN, it will keep that ISSN. However, if a newly digitized version is made, it will be assigned a new ISSN. They also decided to use ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) for identifying publishers.

The Keeper’s Registry began with a narrow scope: preserving e-journals with an ISSN. In the future, the Registry must consider how to integrate websites and databases that are not necessarily “fixed” discrete objects, but that are regularly updating. Other future issues include providing access to cited references within a work, and cataloging and archiving web content. Services like the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine have shown the way when it comes to archiving the web.

One of the most salient points from the article for me is “out of sight, out of mind.” When you walk around stacks of books all the time, it’s clear to see when something needs conserving. The abundance of content online is much more to sort through and it is easier for something to slip through the cracks. I am also intrigued by Burnhill’s discussion of digital fixity and am eager to see what solutions we archivists develop for maintaining content that is in flux.

Comments

  1. StevenMay 3, 2018 at 8:26 AM

    Good work! I'm am also very interested in the "fixity" issue you mention at the end .. how to facilitate in a digital world at scale?? This question is keeping a lot of people up at night!

    Dr. MacCall

    ReplyDelete

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