Online Resources for Scholarship At Risk of Loss: Doing Data on The Keepers

Is there any source of data more important for social science than each nation's published heritage, the content now issued on the web?

When IASSIST began, and for many years afterwards, there was expectation that research libraries kept all kinds of that important printed stuff safe on their shelves, not only scholarly journals but other periodicals such as newspapers, trade magazines and government publications.

The early IASSISTers struggled to have datasets regarded as first class objects within academic support services. That battle might be won, but now our research libraries no longer keep the digital equivalent of that other important stuff. Instead they depend upon third parties as keepers of content for scholarly communication journals.

The Keepers Registry, hosted at https://keepers.issn.org, has become the global monitor on what is being kept by the likes of CLOCKSS, Portico, PKP-PLN, as well as some national libraries and university consortia. The Internet Archive has also signed up as a Keeper.

ISSN is now applied to the websites of governments, news media, commerce, trade and professional bodies and a myriad of other platforms reckoned to have lasting significance. Recent analysis of data from the ISSN Portal indicated progress but also shines a light upon what is reckoned to be at most risk of loss. Not only ‘The Long Tail’ of small publishers, with alarm bells for Open Access journals, but even more so for the wider set of published heritage which is issued online.

Social media diverts our attention; let's not neglect the web resources more formally published online as digital content as they are critical for our scholarship and for public understanding, now and into the future.