EDINA newsline
September 2011: Volume 16 Issue 3
The Keepers Registry Beta service, at thekeepers.org, will be launched on 4 October 2011. The Keepers Registry is the online record of global stewardship by the organisations that have stepped forward to take responsibility for ensuring long-term continuity of access to international scholarship. These organisations now include:
Each archiving organisation has provided a description of their approach to ingest and digital preservation, as well as information on access conditions to the journal content they hold. For the volumes it is ingesting, the archiving organisation supplies metadata, which is normalised and checked against the ISSN Register (an authoritative source for the identification of serial publications world-wide) to produce a record of which journal titles each is preserving, together with a statement of the extent of the journal content that is held. Other archiving organisations have been in contact from across Europe and Canada, China and the USA. We are working together to include a record of the journal content under their care. Your feedback is welcome: edina@ed.ac.uk
The Keepers Registry Beta release on 4 October coincides with the annual meeting of the ISSN Directors, in recognition of the importance of the ISSN Register and the partnership between the ISSN International Centre and EDINA in the PEPRS project.
The Keepers Registry makes use of the new ISSN-L, which is the link identifier between the ISSN assigned to print and that assigned to the electronic versions of a given journal title. Involvement in PEPRS has proved valuable to the ISSN Network in its discussion on how to amend its rules to assign ISSN to digital reproductions in order to cater for digitisation of the issues of journals previously only available in print format. Check for relevant news at the ISSN website.
The Keepers Registry Beta release has been developed from the PEPRS Beta service, which was created by the JISC-funded PEPRS project. We are now exploring “how to be international”: in terms of governance and criteria for additional organisations wishing to register from across the world. We are also seeking sponsorship for this global facility. Contribution on a universal and repurposed holdings statement, the “middle child” of journal metadata, was made to the ALA Forum.