E-Journal Holdings Comparison

Portico offers a E-Journal Holdings Comparison designed to assist librarians in making decisions about maintaining print holdings of e-journal content being preserved by Portico. This comparison is offered at no cost to participating and non-participating libraries.

In order to compare your library's journal holdings to the content in the Portico archive, we will need a list of the ISSN associated with the titles which you hold. This list of ISSNs may be provided to us either as a text file with one ISSN per line (see Figure 1) or an Excel spreadsheet where one of the columns contains the ISSN (see Figure 2). It is acceptable to supply us with an Excel spreadsheet that contains additional columns of data other than those listed in Figure 2. When you are ready to initiate a holdings comparison, contact us to submit title listings.

Figure 1 : ISSN Listing in a Text File


Figure 2 : ISSN Listing in an Excel Spreadsheet


The ISSN may be formatted in any of the following ways:

  • ISSN 0123-456X
  • 0123-456X
  • 0123456X

Once we have this information in hand, Portico staff will compare the ISSN provided by your library with the ISSN in the Portico archive. Portico will return to you an Excel spreadsheet explaining the status of each provided ISSN and it will contain the following columns:

  1. Library ISSN – the ISSN provided by the library
  2. Portico Status – whether or not the title is committed to the archive. There are 3 possible status levels:
    • Not Committed - this title has not been committed to the Portico archive at this time
    • Committed - this title is committed to the archive but we have not yet begun ingesting and preserving it
    • Archived - this title is committed to the archive and we are actively ingesting and preserving its content
  1. Portico P-ISSN – the print ISSN we have associated with this title.
  2. Portico E-ISSN – the E-ISSN we have associated with this title.
  3. Portico Title – the title which Portico has for this ISSN.
  4. Portico Publisher – the publisher who is providing content for this title to Portico and indication of whether the publisher has designated Portico as a post-cancellation access mechanism.

If you originally provided us with a text file listing ISSN, we will return to you a spreadsheet with only the above columns. If you originally provided us with a spreadsheet, we will return to you a spreadsheet containing your original data and the Portico data.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Last updated on February 6, 2009

The Portico digital preservation service is part of ITHAKA (www.ithaka.org),
a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies
to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.

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