In the last ten years concern among research libraries about the persistence of digital resources has grown. As a result, some major building blocks for the infrastructure of digital preservation have now been put in place: trusted digital repositories like Portico, CLOCKSS and Scholars Portal. They provide independent archiving of journal content from large academic and scientific publishers like Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. Attendees at the April 2016 @Risk Forum on print sharing and archiving agreed on the need to broaden the community’s support for those trusted repositories, which, if better funded, could bear a greater share of the burden of preserving serials and other materials that are electronically available to CRL libraries.

As part of an effort to strategically expand the universe of archived title holdings, CRL hosted a webinar in February, 2016, to examine how Portico has expanded its coverage of smaller electronic publishers, and the approach Portico is taking to capturing the journal content that remains "elusive" and at risk of “going dark.” This webinar will examine how communities use the Stanford University Libraries LOCKSS Program to preserve at risk content.

The LOCKSS technology’s flexible ingest methods allow the CLOCKSS Archive and other LOCKSS networks to drive down costs and dramatically expand the number of publishers under preservation. To further reduce costs, the LOCKSS software is evolving to use a state-of-the-art Web services architecture and converge with mainstream Web archiving. Communities using the LOCKSS Software are preserving over 1000 “long tail” journal publishers, where “long tail” is defined as publishers with ten or fewer journals. Content from these publishers is most at-risk for loss, making preservation vital to guarantee future access to the material for research and teaching.

Presentations from Victoria Reich and Nicholas Taylor will cover: the “long tail” defined and why it matters; why CRL libraries are interested in preserving the long tail;  how unique approaches implemented by the Stanford University Libraries LOCKSS Program work to preserve the long tail; what are the opportunities for preserving the long tail as a part of general web archiving activities; and how we might work together to address this critical need.

Reich and Taylor have questions for CRL member libraries:

1. Which subject areas that you support have long-tail content?
2. Provided the technical means, would you be interested in collecting that content?
3. Who else (collaborators, stakeholders) shares your interest in collecting that content?
4. What are the opportunities for working together on preserving that content?