The National Library of Spain, through the Spanish Web Archive, has saved more than 10,000 publications during the fifth annual collection of open-access electronic serial publications, which has been carried out since 2020.
According to the entity, this work is being carried out with the aim of saving as much cultural and documentary heritage as possible on the Internet, of which electronic magazines are one of the “most ephemeral” content. Specifically, the BNE assures that every year serial publications are continually created and disappear, many of them without a printed version, so they become “irrecoverable” content.
Specifically, in 2024, the number of websites collected with electronic serial publications has been more than 10,000, exceeding 9,000 serial titles, from which around 2.4 terabytes of information have been collected.
This has been possible, according to a statement, thanks to improvements in pre-capture debugging and review techniques, which have increased the amount of relevant information in half the storage and in a much shorter time compared to 2023.
“MASSIVE” COLLECTION OF ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS
Due to the “irrecoverable” content of the publications, in 2020 the websites of these electronic publications began to be saved in a “massive and systematic” manner, including the digital copies they contain, so that they can be recovered in the future if they disappear.
Likewise, the Spanish Web Archive requests those subscription journals that cannot be automatically captured because they are not open access, especially those publications without a printed version and, therefore, with a greater risk of permanent loss.
RECOVERY OF MAGAZINES NO LONGER DISAPPEARED
However, many series have disappeared since the creation of the BNE Archive, so the entity is working on a project that seeks to recover them.
In this way, the BNE seeks to connect the technical means and human resources at its disposal in order to, with the help of editors and producers, achieve the goal of preserving electronic serial publications, which until now were not preserved in a systematic manner.
Secondly, it seeks to raise awareness of the benefits that the preservation of electronic publications represents for both editors and researchers, as well as for citizens in general, as a way of safeguarding a very important part of Spain’s cultural and scientific heritage.