"Contains Scenes of Mild Peril": The state of digital preservation across seven million articles
Eve, Martin Paul (2023) "Contains Scenes of Mild Peril": The state of digital preservation across seven million articles. In: 2023 Charleston Conference, 27th November 2023, Online.
Abstract
Digital preservation underpins the persistence of scholarly links and citations through the DOI system. But we do not currently know, at scale, the extent to which articles assigned a DOI are adequately preserved. In this talk, I describe our efforts to construct a database of preservation information from original archival sources and then to examine the preservation statuses of 7,438,037 DOIs in a random sample. Our work reveals an alarming preservation deficit. Only 0.96% of Crossref members (n=204) can be confirmed to digitally preserve over 75% of their content in 3 or more of the archives that we studied. A slightly larger proportion – 8.5% (n=1,797) – preserved over 50% of their content in 2 or more archives. Many members – 57.7% (n=12,257) – though, only met the threshold of having 25% of their material in a single archive. Most worryingly, 32.9% (n=6,982) of Crossref members seem not to have any adequate digital preservation in place, against the recommendations of the Digital Preservation Coalition. In light of these findings, I suggest a number of currently lacking infrastructural mechanisms that we need to improve the state of digital preservation. If we want the digital scholarly record to persist beyond the twenty-first century, we are still quite some way from guaranteeing this.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Keynote) |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication |
| Depositing User: | Martin Eve |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Nov 2023 15:42 |
| Last Modified: | 20 Nov 2023 15:42 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/52502 |
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