About PEPRS
Overview
The PEPRS project, jointly led by EDINA with the ISSN International Centre, has been funded to develop a registry service to provide easily accessible information about inclusion of journals in preservation services. PEPRS was funded by JISC until July 2012 (extended to September 2012) to implement a service-level system.
In Phase 1 of the Project (August 2008 – July 2010) a demonstrator registry was created. The demonstrator was shown to a number of potential users and feedback was obtained. From that user feedback, in Phase 2 (August 2010 – July 2012, extended to September 2012) a Beta service was developed and launched in April 2011.
In October 2011 the beta service was renamed the Keepers Registry.
Project activity including developments have continued to be carried out under the PEPRS banner.
Activity to establish a registry has been ongoing for several years. In 2008, JISC published a report entitled: "Scoping study for a registry of electronic journals that indicates where they are archived" 1. The authors of the report interviewed a range of stakeholders including representatives from national and university libraries, publishers and archiving organizations, recommending that a registry be established.
Phase 1 of the PEPRS project ran from August 2008 until July 2010, during which detailed user requirements were gathered from librarians and preservation agencies, and a prototype system based on these was developed.
Phase 2 of PEPRS has now been funded from August 2010 to July 2012 (extended to September 2012) to develop the prototype into a service level implementation.
Aims and Objectives
Our goal has been to provide librarians and policy makers with information on provision for continuing access all scholarly work published in e-journals. We aimed to provide an authoritative, low-cost and up-to-date online facility that lets a range of stakeholders check the archival provision for e-journals and to identify the gaps in such provision.
Why have we been doing this?
There is general consensus that digital preservation is important and several schemes and organisations are now emerging. But there has been no systematic source of information about who is doing what for each e-journal: preservation arrangements, policies and access arrangements.
The beta service has brought together information about journals and their preservation situation, providing easily accessible information about preservation arrangements and highlighting those e-journals for which no preservation arrangements exist. This service will be of benefit to policy makers, librarians and publishers, and by implication to researchers.
Deliverables
The outputs have been:
- Release of beta system, which over time will develop into full service
- Definition of user/stakeholder requirements
- Statement of information architecture and interfaces, standards and protocols
- Project-to-service plan, for roll-out and launch of service and phased enhancement of functionality.
- Promotion and advocacy of PEPRS
Preservation Agencies
PEPRS is currently working with the following preservation agencies.
- British Library
- CLOCKSS
- eDepot (Koninklijke Bibliotheek/The National Library of the Netherlands)
- General LOCKSS Network
- HathiTrust
- Portico
- National Science Library China
